Shelley Cobb (Auth.) - Adaptation, Authorship, and Contemporary Women Filmmakers (2015, Palgrave Macmillan UK) PDF

Adaptation, Authorship, and Contemporary Women
Filmmakers
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Adaptation, Authorship,
and Contemporary
Women Filmmakers
Shelley Cobb
University of Southampton, UK
© Shelley Cobb 2015
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First published 2015 by
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Cobb, Shelley.
Adaptation, authorship, and contemporary women filmmakers / Shelley
Cobb, University of Southampton, UK.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Film adaptations—History and criticism. 2. Literature—Women
authors—History and criticism. 3. Women motion picture producers and
directors. 4. Motion pictures and literature. I. Title.
PN1997.85.C63 2015
791.43082—dc23 2014023217
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction: Agency, Adaptation, and Authorship 1

1 Envisioning Judith Shakespeare: Collaboration and
the Woman Author 19
2 Adapt or Die: The Dangers of Women’s Authorship 49
3 Authorizing the Mother: Sisterhoods in America 79
4 Postfeminist Austen: By Women, for Women,
about Women 113
Conclusion: The Secret Life of Bees and Authorial Subversion 139
Notes 148
Bibliography 153
Index 162
v
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Felicity Plester and Chris Penfold at Palgrave for
their assistance, and the Faculty of Humanities at the University of
Southampton for giving me research leave to write this book. I have
been lucky to have several women mentors who were invaluable
influences on this book and who continue to offer me guidance as
well as friendship, and I want to thank Yvonne Tasker, Diane Negra,
Linda Ruth Williams, and Sarah Churchwell for their generosity.
My family has been very supportive, and I want to thank my Dad,
Rosie, Tyson, Lauren, Rebecca, Hugh, Jason, for their love. To all
my lovely nieces and nephews: I miss you. Extra love and thanks
go to my sister Susan for being my confidante and ally; I would
not have made it through some weeks without hearing her voice.
Aberdeenshire has become another important home base, and I am
grateful to the Ewens for their love and support. I am grateful for all
the female friends I have: Mindi Combs, whose optimism and regu-
lar emails have been particularly important in sustaining my sanity
and my determination; Hannah Hamad, who regularly makes me
laugh and reminds me not to worry; Nicky Marsh, whose sense of
humour has turned a bad day good on many occasions. Since being
at Southampton, Mike and Mary Hammond and the Hammond clan
have become another family for me, as have Liam Connell, Nicky
Marsh, and their boys, and I am grateful for all the support, friend-
ship, and booze. Neil Ewen, my husband and best friend, read the
entire manuscript more than once and helped compile the index.
I would not have finished without his love, support, encouragement,
and advice. This book is dedicated to my mother, whose voice I miss
every day.
Portions of Chapter 4 come from ‘What Would Jane Do?: Postfeminist
Media Uses of Austen and the Austen Reader’, in Uses of Austen:
Jane’s Afterlives, Clare Hanson and Gillian Dow, editors (Palgrave
Macmillan, August 2012), and I am grateful for permission to reprint
the material here.
vi
Introduction: Agency, Adaptation,
and Authorship
This book examines contemporary film adaptations directed by

women (often working with women screenwriters, producers, and
sometimes editors) that foreground the figure of the woman author.
All but one are adapted from novels by women writers. The woman
author in the film does not always correspond to a figure of the
woman author in the novel; and in two films, the figure of the
woman author is tangential to the characters’ fantasy of an histori-
cal woman author. Mary Eagleton, in her book, Figuring the Woman
Author in Contemporary Fiction, argues ‘the need for women to claim
cultural legitimacy through authorizing themselves in various ways
is indisputable’ (2005: 2). In all the films examined in this book,
I see the figure of the woman author in the text functioning as both a
representative of female agency and as a vehicle for representing the
authorizing of the woman filmmaker, thereby making a claim for the
cultural legitimacy of female film authorship. As such, I am following,
to an extent, Timothy Corrigan’s argument that ‘Authors on films are
only … metaphoric displacements of the real agents of film: sometimes
actors but, usually and more effectively, auteurs’ (166). Where I differ
with Corrigan is with his unqualified use of the term auteur. Though
I am sympathetic to his desire to disrupt the traditional weighting of
literary authorship over film authorship in adaptation studies, auteur-
ism is still an exclusionary model of authorship. It is a term that,
because of its masculine connotations, has neither been readily avail-
able for women filmmakers nor wholly accepted by feminist film the-
orists. Consequently, I want to think about how women have sought
to establish their authority as film authors in other ways. The fact
1
2 Adaptation, Authorship, and Contemporary Women Filmmakers
that these films are adaptations inevitably complicates the representa-

tion of the woman filmmaker’s authorship and agency: the woman
filmmaker now has one more collaborator, the woman writer, in the
already collaborative art of filmmaking. However, the overriding view
put forward in this book is that in opposition to the individualistic
and masculine image of the auteur, collaborative authorship makes
space for the woman author to authorize herself. It is my contention
that in their identity as adaptations and their representation of the
woman author, these films made by women uniquely represent the
difficulties of female agency in the contemporary, postfeminist period.
Women’s authorship and cinema
Virginia Woolf is famously (mis)quoted as saying, ‘For most of history,

Anonymous was a woman’. The actual quote from A Room of One’s
Own is more specific: ‘I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote
so many poems without signing them, was a woman’ (1929: 41).
The misquote turns Woolf’s canny retort about the historical lack of
female poets of genius into a feminist axiom about the resistance to
women’s authority and genius across all forms of authorship. From
poetry to science to historiography to cinema and more, historically,
women’s authorial signatures have been hidden and obscured. In the
twenty-first century, when feminism’s first inroads into the academy
are now 40 years past and terms like ‘gynocriticism’ and ‘herstory’
have fallen out of fashion, reclaiming women’s authorship may seem
redundant to some. However, in an interview in the Guardian about
her new series of portraits of forgotten women artists, Annie Kevans
says, ‘For hundreds of years there was this very strong control over
the canon and [the male-dominated establishment] didn’t want
women written into it … As a contemporary artist, there are still con-
cerns. I do think, what if that happened to me?’ (Frizell, 2014). I, too,
have concerns that when it comes to women’s artistry and author-
ship that what has happened before can easily happen again. This
concern in regards to contemporary women filmmakers is the impe-
tus for my looking closely in this book at 11 film adaptations made
by women since 1990. My concern, of course, is politically motivated
by my feminist politics. The lack of status for women in the contem-
porary film industry has become an increasingly urgent issue in the
media. Every year during award season, articles are written lament-
ing the numbers of women directors nominated for awards and the
Introduction 3
major festivals get rightly taken down for not including many films
by women in their programmes. As I write this introduction, the
2014 Cannes Film Festival is about to begin. Jane Campion, the only
woman to have won the Palme d’Or (which she shared with Chen
Kaige) heads a jury with a majority of women that includes the
directors Sofia Coppola and Jeon Do-yeon; however, only two films
directed by women are up for the Palme d’Or this year, and though
the festival boasts a total of 15 women directors, five of them con-
tributed to the multi-directed documentary Bridges of Sarajevo.1 Often
these articles on women directors mention the Annual Celluloid
Ceiling Report which is produced by the Center for Study of Women
in Television and Film at San Diego State University. Each year the
report shows the percentage of directors, writers, producers, exec-
producers, editors and cinematographers (working on the top 250
grossing films) who are women: in 1998 women constituted 17% of
the total of all those roles, and in 2013 they constituted 16%. As Sue
Thornham has suggested, these numbers show ‘how far we should
be from complacency’ (2012: 2). It seems to me that for feminist
academics our main weapon against complacency – in the face of
the low numbers of women who get to make films and the potential
exclusion of those films from canonical histories – is to write about
films made by women.
And we do write about films made by women. Claire Johnston’s
and Pam Cook’s work on Dorothy Arzner and Annette Kuhn’s and
Charlotte Brunsdon’s work on women in the feminist filmmaking
movement were foundational in establishing feminist film criticism.
More recently, there is a veritable industry in academic analysis of
Jane Campion and her films (there are at least four monographs and
four edited collections, as well as innumerable articles and chapters).
Other directors of English-language cinema like Sally Potter and
Kathryn Bigelow also receive a lot of academic attention. In addition
to the focus on individual directors, there are several books that con-
sider women filmmakers in groups based on national identity, espe-
cially in countries like France, Australia, and Canada that at different
points in recent history have had strong state support for women’s
filmmaking. Most recently, Sue Thornham, in her book What if I Had
Been the Hero: Investigating Women’s Cinema, argues that:
it remains important, it seems to me, to explore in terms of femi-

nist theory these films which, to borrow Nancy Miller’s words,
bear the signature of women, since by their very nature they must
engage with those issues which have been of concern to feminist
theorists: questions of subjectivity, of narrative and its relation to
gender, of fantasy and desire, of the gendered ordering of space
and time, and of regulation and agency. (2012: 1)
I am also concerned with analysing films that ‘bear the signature of

women’, and it is my contention that the films in this book negotiate
the feminist concerns of subjectivity, narrative, fantasy and desire,
space and time, and, most importantly, agency through the figure of
the woman author.
Focusing on adaptations might seem an oblique approach to
women’s authorship, since adaptation studies has long been margin-
alized in film criticism – though that has been changing recently –
and when the dominant approach to adaptations has been fidelity
criticism, which, as many adaptation scholars have shown, subor-
dinates the film to the authority of the novel. So, to be clear: the
thing I spend the least time exploring in this book is the translation
of the novel to film, which would require a ‘comparative stylistics
of the two media [to decide] which features are “translatable” and
which are not’ (Stam, 2004: 40–41). What I am most interested in is
how the women who made these films use adaptation to foreground
authorship; how these adaptations are places from which the female
voice, to use Kaja Silverman’s phrasing, ‘can speak and be heard’
(2003:192). Much of the time this means analysing the representa-
tion of authorship in the text, but it also means analysing the rep-
resentation of authorship outside the text, which includes both the
novelists and the filmmakers (usually directors, but also, in some
cases, screenwriters, producers and other production personnel). The
amount of time spent on analysing each of these varies from chapter
to chapter. Whichever comes to the fore has depended on a combi-
nation of things: how prominent the representation of authorship is
in the text, how much the filmmakers have talked about the writers’
whom they have adapted, and how culturally prominent are the
women authors, both of the novel and the film. Approaching film
adaptation in this way is my attempt to situate my feminist political
interest in women’s authorship at the intersection of the texts with
their contexts. I have been influenced by Claire Johnston’s statement
Introduction 5
of the value of studying women’s film authorship while recognizing

its limits:
Polemics for women’s creativity are fine as long as we realise

they are polemics. The notion of women’s creativity per se is as
limited as the notion of men’s creativity. It is basically an idealist
conception which elevates the idea of the ‘artist’ (involving the
pitfall of elitism), and undermines any view of art as a material
thing within a cultural context which forms it and is formed by
it. (1999: 36)
For me, to recognize that cultural context forms art and art is
informed by cultural context requires the recognition of the status of
the woman author, or, more to the polemical point, her lack of status.
The rhetoric around women filmmakers and the analysis of their
authorial identities necessarily has to contend with their excep-
tionalism; in other words, because there are relatively few female
filmmakers, they cannot be talked about, reviewed, analysed, or
appreciated in the same way as male filmmakers. This is in part due
to the masculinized discourse and image of the auteur as well as to
the conspicuousness of the few, well-known women film directors.
Their conspicuousness functions to make manifest the gendered
nature of authorship. The period in which the films in this book
were made and exhibited is specifically post-feminist (I use the
hyphen in this instance to emphasize the chronological meaning of
the term) in that the production and financial contexts that allowed
for a feminist avant-garde filmmaking movement during the 1970s
and 1980s no longer exists. This period of films by women has been
well documented by B. Ruby Rich, Annette Kuhn, and others, and
the uniqueness of that era for developing women’s filmmaking is
evidenced by the government funding (in both the US and UK) for
alternative cinema; the benefit of this funding for women’s groups,
organizations, and coalitions that made films; the exhibition of these
films at women’s community centres and at universities, especially
those with growing women’s studies departments; and the connec-
tions between the feminist avant-garde movement, academic theory,
and identity politics of the period. The loss of much of this support
system throughout the late 1980s meant that by the 1990s women
filmmakers had to find new provisions for making and exhibiting

films. In the 1990s, some women filmmakers who had made films
associated with the feminist filmmaking of the 1970s and 1980s
moved into the independent sector to make more ‘mainstream’ nar-
rative fiction films.2 One of the most high profile of these women is
Sally Potter, whose first ‘mainstream’ narrative film was an adapta-
tion of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, with which this book begins.
The postfeminist context
In her article ‘From Female Friends to Literary Ladies: The Contem-

porary Women’s Film’, Karen Hollinger notes that ‘many classic
adaptations [of the 1990s] represent attempts by female screenwrit-
ers, directors, and production executives to recapture for a contem-
porary female audience the distinctive voices of prominent women
of the past, either real or fictional’ (2002: 78). She lists as examples
Little Women (Gillian Armstrong, 1994), Sense and Sensibility (Ang
Lee, 1995), Clueless (Amy Heckerling, 1995), Mrs. Dalloway (Marleen
Gorris, 1997), Washington Square (Agnieszka Holland, 1997), and
The Portrait of a Lady ( Jane Campion, 1997).3 Since then, of course,
women filmmakers have made several more adaptations of clas-
sic novels from Mansfield Park (Rozema, 1999), which I consider in
Chapter 1 alongside Orlando (Sally Potter, 1992), to Vanity Fair (Mira
Nair, 2004) and Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold, 2011). In her arti-
cle, Hollinger implicitly draws on early feminist film scholarship on
‘the woman’s film’ and women’s films made by feminist filmmakers.
A prominent example of this kind of work that links the analysis of
women’s production with women’s representation, in both main-
stream and counter cinemas, is Annette Kuhn’s Women’s Pictures:
Feminism and Cinema, published in 1982. In it, she gives two sections
to the reading and analysis of dominant cinema and its represen-
tations of women. The last section, ‘Replacing dominant cinema:
Feminism and film practice’, focuses on the feminist countercinema
of the 1970s and 1980s, a period in which many female filmmak-
ers made documentary and avant-garde films about women and
women’s stories. Hollinger has chosen films that are too mainstream
in their narrative forms and content to have any parallel with Kuhn’s
countercinema. The connection I am suggesting is more abstract.
Hollinger never explicitly names any of the films as feminist. But by
Introduction 7
invoking the genre of the woman’s film, she implicitly makes the
connection by evoking feminist scholarship like Kuhn’s that exhibits
early feminist film theory’s interest in both the classical Hollywood
‘woman’s film’ and the women’s films of the feminist filmmak-
ing movement, suggesting the possibility of a feminist reading of
women’s production in a mainstream context.
Other feminist scholars, such as Christina Lane, in her book
Feminist Hollywood: From Born in Flames to Point Break, have made
similar and more explicit claims in relation to directors like Kathryn
Bigelow and Darnell Martin who have made films with Hollywood
studios. Lane makes the argument that feminists need to consider
women filmmakers ‘who overtly engage feminist politics as well
as those who are not easily linked with feminism’ and to take into
account ‘the many dilemmas confronted by women, not just femi-
nists, given the indication of discrimination by industry statistics’
(Lane, 2000: 10). Though the classic-novel adaptations that Hollinger
lists and the two I consider in Chapter 1 are not mainstream films
(they are independent productions), other films in this book are,
including How to Make an American Quilt (Jocelyn Moorhouse, 1995)
and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (Callie Khouri, 2002). These
mainstream cinema adaptations based on contemporary popular
novels, as well as the classic-novel adaptations mentioned above,
appear in the context of the late twentieth-century and early twenty-
first century growth of the ‘chick flick’, described by Roberta Garrett:
from the first big cycle of women’s melodramas in the early

1980s, through the persistent stream of high-profile costume dra-
mas, and, in particular, the continuing triumph of new romantic
comedy, female-oriented and identified cycles have continued to
flourish throughout the 1990s and into the twenty-first century.
(Garrett, 4)
Some of the highest grossing films of the early 1990s include Ghost
( Jerry Zucker, 1990), Pretty Woman (Garry Marshall,1990), Fried Green
Tomatoes ( Jon Avnet, 1991), Sleeping with the Enemy ( Joseph Ruben,
1991) The Bodyguard (Mick Jackson, 1992), A League of Their Own
(Penny Marshall, 1992), and Sleepless in Seattle (Nora Ephron, 1993);
it is also important to remember that the controversial and seminal
‘chick flick’ Thelma and Louise was released in 1991.4 Throughout
the decade and into the early 2000s, the differing elements of melo-
drama and comedy have coalesced to produce what are now quintes-
sential chick flicks like Just Like Heaven (Mark Waters, 2005) and P.S.
I Love You (Richard LaGravenese, 2007) where death, comedy, and
romance are all integral elements of the plot. The important point is
that all of these chick flicks evoke the classical Hollywood genre of
the woman’s film in which the narrative belongs to the female char-
acter and male characters are, to an extent, sidelined. The ‘popular’
adaptations in this book are a part of this trend.
Focusing on women filmmakers and women’s narratives of the
1990s and the 2000s inevitably means engaging with the changing
image and place of feminism in Anglo-American society. The cultural
‘backlash’ discourse against feminism during the 1980s, articulated
by Susan Faludi in her book Backlash published in 1991, had by the
early 1990s begun to transform into the ‘postfeminist’ cultural dis-
course that has continued to develop through the early twenty-first
century. In her article ‘Postfeminism and Popular Culture’, Angela
McRobbie reflects back on this early period of the 1990s as a signifi-
cant historical moment for feminism. She writes, ‘we could say that
1990 (or thereabouts) marks a turning point, the moment of defini-
tive self-critique in feminist theory … In feminist cultural studies,
the early 1990s also marks a moment of feminist reflexivity … The
year 1990 also marked the moment at which the concept of popular
feminism found expression’ (2007: 29). She cites popular women’s
magazines’ growing attention to long-term feminist concerns such
as domestic violence and equal pay as evidence of feminism’s wider
influence, while pointing to important developments in feminist
scholarship at the time, which further raised feminism’s profile in
the academy, such as influential work by postcolonial theorists,
new theories of the body, and critiques of the distinction between
‘ordinary women’ and feminists. This ‘feminist success’ both inside
and outside the academy raised both contention and promise within
feminism:
With feminism as part of the academic curriculum (i.e., ‘canon-

ized’), then it is not surprising that it might also be countered …
and [feminists should] not be so surprised when young women
students decline the invitation to identify as a ‘we’ … (Following
Judith Butler) I saw this sense of contestation on the part of young
Introduction 9
women … as one of potential where a lively dialogue about how

feminism might develop would commence. (2007: 30)
However, as McRobbie goes on to show, the contentious possibilities

were overtaken in the 1990s and early 2000s by postfeminist dis-
courses that constructed feminism as redundant. My conception of
postfeminism coincides with that articulated by Yvonne Tasker and
Diane Negra:
Postfeminism broadly encompasses a set of assumptions, widely

disseminated within popular media forms, having to do with the
‘pastness’ of feminism, whether that supposed pastness is merely
noted, mourned, or celebrated … What appears distinctive about
contemporary postfeminist culture is … the extent to which
a selectively defined feminism has been so overtly ‘taken into
account’. (2007: 1)
In their anthology Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics

of Popular Culture, Tasker and Negra and their contributors largely
focus on issues of gender representation in twenty-first century
popular culture; therefore, my use of the term modifies and specifies
theirs through my choice to focus on women’s production and the
representation of women by women filmmakers during the period
in which the term, as Tasker and Negra argue, ‘concretized’ (8). This
also means that my use of the term develops and changes with each
chapter as the film texts are products of the intensifying postfemi-
nist culture. In the early 1990s, ‘postfeminism’ was still, for some,
interchangeable with ‘backlash’. For example, within the reception
of Sally Potter’s Orlando, the term is often used to signify a nega-
tive view of her move from feminist avant-garde filmmaking into
mainstream narrative filmmaking, as well as to signify a distinction
between her apparent postfeminism and Virginia Woolf’s ‘authentic’
feminism. In the mid-1990s, when the difference between third-
wave feminism and postfeminism as a neo-conservative discourse
was not yet distinct, mainstream films like Little Women and How to
Make an American Quilt incorporate more explicit gestures to femi-
nist ideals through their representations of sisterhood than do more
recent postfeminist chick flicks. At the turn of the millennium, post-
feminism’s emphasis on individual female success as an indicator
of feminism’s redundancy is the context in which three female

auteurs – Kathryn Bigelow, Lynne Ramsey, and Jane Campion –
make adaptations that highlight the dangers of women’s author-
ship. At this time, the successful, white, bourgeois female begins
to develop as the representative image of postfeminist culture.5 By
the early 2000s, postfeminism in mainstream media products had
become the set of assumptions Tasker and Negra describe above,
understood as a neo-conservative discourse of popular media culture.
The two Austen-related adaptations examined in the final chapter of
this book, clearly articulate postfeminist culture’s current ambiva-
lent relationship with feminism and its dependent relationship with
women’s consumer culture (which includes the fan culture around
Austen’s authorship).
Adaptation as conversation and collaboration
It is my contention in this book that adaptations can be particularly

productive texts for thinking about film authorship and the cultural
politics of gender, but we must shift our view of adaptation away
from the source as the standard and, instead, ‘explore the particu-
lar ways in which [film] adaptations make their own meanings’
(Geraghty, 2008:4). Robert Stam has declared that we cannot only
reject fidelity criticism but that ‘we need … a new language and a
new set of tropes for speaking about adaptation’ (Stam, 2004: 24).
I have argued elsewhere that no one trope or metaphor will be able
to replace the language of fidelity for all adaptations without again
reducing some or even many to the binary of source and adaptation
(Cobb, 2011). In this book, I think about women’s adaptations as
a conversation. As a critical tool, the metaphor of conversation is
invoked by Bakhtinian theory and the concept of dialogism:
Dialogism refers to the relation between the text and its others
not only in the relatively crude and obvious forms of argument –
polemics and parody – but also in much more diffuse and subtle
forms that have to do with overtones, pauses, implied attitude,
what is left unsaid or is to be inferred. (Stam, 1989: 14)
It is a model that privileges a multiplicity of voices in and between

texts and theorizes the necessity of that mulitiplicity for the
Introduction 11
meaning-making of texts. It makes room in the analysis of adapta-

tions for influences on the process of adaptation that have largely
been ignored in favour of an almost obsessive search for narrato-
logical equivalences. Uninterested in one-to-one correspondences,
dialogism promotes ways of ‘restoring voice to the silenced’ and the
critic using Bakhtinian theories is compelled to ‘call attention to the
voices at play in a text, not only those heard in aural “close-up”, but
also those voices dominated, distorted, or drowned out by the text’
(Stam, 2004: 14). The critical intent to restore voice to the silenced
is akin to the interests of feminist theory and practice and a femi-
nist view of dialogism would be interested in also listening to those
textual voices marginalized by virtue of their gender, sexuality, class,
and race.6
Conversation, as metaphor for a dialogical approach, does not
necessarily depend on agreement or any kind of understood final
outcome, decision, or solution. It depends, rather, on interaction
and exchange. A conversation is not a monologue, a soliloquy, an
oration, an address, a sermon or a lecture. A conversation may be
an interaction between two people or amongst several people, but
it always requires more than one. When we label an experience of
speaking with (an)other(s) as conversation, we have understood it as
something very different than if we labelled that experience an argu-
ment or debate. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in their Metaphors
We Live By, make it clear that we not only understand argument
through the metaphor of war but that it also structures how we
engage in it: ‘We can actually win or lose arguments. We see the per-
son we are arguing with as an opponent. We attack his decisions and
defend our own. We gain and lose ground. We plan and use strate-
gies’ (1980: 14). Although participants in a conversation may have
differing ideas on the topic discussed, in the end they may come
to agree or continue to disagree but they do not view each other as
either having won or lost. Consequently, sometimes conversations
can be banal and unremarkable and, even, forgettable, which may
be the biggest weakness of the metaphor, especially as adaptations,
in many instances, have been regarded as redundant, bland, safe (if
not conservative), and unexciting. However, these possible qualities
do not preclude conversations from being important, meaningful,
exciting, inspiring, even illuminating and very possibly troubling. A
conversation demands the ability to share, meaning both the ability
to express one’s ideas, thoughts, opinions, even feelings, and the

ability to share time and space.7 Conversation concerns both what
we say and what we hear. We often say that a conversation has left
us with something to think about. A conversation may prompt us
to change our minds, or it could very well reinforce our position. A
conversation can be an agent of change and/or understanding. Most
importantly though, as I said above, a conversation requires more
than one: more than one person, more than one voice, more than
one listening. Adaptation by definition – a text identified as a version
of an already existing text while simultaneously identified as distinct
and other from that text – requires more than one, at the very least
there is the adapted text and the adaptation.
The metaphor of conversation also destabilizes the binaries of
adaptation that centre on the materiality of the two texts (literature/
film, word/image, verbal/visual) by making room for other partici-
pants beyond the two texts: the adaptation as a process and a prod-
uct converses with both the novel’s and the film’s historical, cultural,
and aesthetic contexts (Hutcheon, 2007: xiv). These contexts of
course include the author(s):
dialogism entails a view of the individual and, by extension,

of the literary or film author, as existing in, and even in some
measure created by dialogue … the author is further relativized
in Bakhtin’s work by the idea of his or her necessary … depend-
ence on the linguistic and literary environment. The author lives
in short, within, and thanks to, intertextuality. (Stam, 1989: 15)
The filmmaker’s position in relation to larger culture is dialogical;

the discursive auteur is both constructed by intertextuality and the
constructor of intertextuality. Within adaptation studies this means
that the discursive authorial identities of both authors (novelist and
filmmaker) participate in the construction of each other’s discursive
authorship. Viewed this way, my approach to adaptations is similar
to Guerica DeBona’s, who has suggested ‘a kind of matrix for this
field of study, broadly consisting of intertextuality, cultural value,
and authorship’ (7). However, as I have made clear, the woman
author does not have the same access to the cultural value as the
male author, who is necessarily the source of the ‘aura of authorship’
Introduction 13
that DeBona considers in his focus on adaptations of the classical

Hollywood era (2010: 6). As François Meltzer argues,
Western notions of individualistic (literary) authorship are sus-

tained by an ‘insistence on the new, the creative, and the true’
which further enforce another series of beliefs: in the individual
and his – and I do mean his – sovereignty; in a patriarchal hegem-
ony as dominating culture and metaphysics; in a concomitant
feminine economy as eternally secondary, unable by definition to
partake of an originary model; [and] in private property and the
exclusionary systems that ensue. (Meltzer, 1994: 6)
To counter the patriarchal tendencies of both literary and film

theories of authorship, the metaphor of conversation as applied to
women’s adaptations implies collaboration. In her book, Women
Coauthors, Holly Laird examines the possibility of co-authorship in
several texts that range from the highly contested, such as the coau-
thorship of Autobiography by John Stuart Mill and, as Laird argues,
Harriet Taylor Mills, to the self-proclaimed, such as the Canadian
feminists Daphne Marlatt and Betsy Warland. Laird explicitly
removes herself from the critical game of trying to pick out which
bits of text belong to which author by ‘biographical detection or
dissection’ and declares the divided origins and ownership of the
language of the texts as unknowable (2000: 12). Instead, she ‘read[s]
these texts as acts and representations of collaboration [which]
makes a decisive difference in the analysis … it brings attention to
the many borders approached, blurred, or dissolved in these texts’
(2000: 5–6). Coauthorship between two living people in a working
and/or personal relationship with each other intrinsically disturbs
our reverence for the solitary author and interferes with our cultural
value of originality, individuality, and authority: ‘When two writers
come together to produce a text, they cannot be the single centre of
intention that critics have often taken writers to be, and the texts
thus produced are inevitably intertextual’ (2000: 182). Her model of
intertextual collaboration inevitably evokes the process of adapta-
tion, especially when the novelist is a co-writer on the screenplay
such as on Austenland ( Jerusha Hess, 2013), which I consider in
Chapter 4.
Laird’s model does not have to be limited to instances in which

the various authors were living contributors to the adaptation. Her
model echoes that of Lori Chamberlain’s proposed feminist model
for translation in which the nature of coauthorship is not in the
practice of two or more people writing/authoring together but in the
nature of the process itself:
what is required for a feminist theory of translation is a practice

governed by what Derrida calls the double bind … Such a theory
might rely, not on the family model of oedipal struggle, but on
the double-edged razor of translation as collaboration, where
author and translator are seen as working together, both in the
cooperative and the subversive sense. (1992: 71)
Collaboration in adaptation, then, removes authorship from fidel-

ity discourses and its inevitable hierarchy. A model of coauthorship
and collaboration sidesteps these power struggles for an emphasis on
the complexities of the conversation between and amongst all the
participants:
The numerous models and metaphors that appear in collaborative

feminist scholars’ discussions of their coauthorship touch mostly
on the playfulness rather than the labor involved … and the
conversational model appears more pervasively than any other.
(2000: 5)
Certainly, the metaphor of conversation is not exclusive to a feminist

critique. However, its value for this project is its ability to subvert the
binaries and hierarchies of adaptation and authorship and to allow
space for figuring the authority of the woman author.
The figure of the woman author
In her book A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon argues that ‘adap-

tations disrupt elements like priority and authority … But they can also
destabilize both formal and cultural identity and thereby shift power
relations’. She then asks: ‘Could that subversive potential also be part
of the appeal of adapting for adapters and audiences alike?’ (2007:
174). It may be clear already that I think the subversive potential of
Introduction 15
adaptations is appealing for women filmmakers and that the main

point of subversion is in the authorial function. As I have said, the
figure of the woman author is key for thinking about female author-
ship as a metaphor for female agency. Sean Burke has suggested that,
‘It would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that the struggles of femi-
nism have been primarily a struggle for authorship – understood in
the widest sense as the arena in which culture attempts to define itself’
(1995: 145). His claim only makes sense if we think of authorship as a
metaphor for agency and the struggle for female agency as the struggle
to authorize oneself while being a woman. The difficulty of authoriz-
ing oneself for women is made more difficult in a postfeminist culture
that often constructs successful subjectivity for women as either neo-
traditional femininity or empowered sexualization. The woman author
always has more to define herself than her relationships or her body.
She has something that she owns: her story. In Gillian Armstrong’s
1979 film adaptation of Miles Franklin’s novel, My Brilliant Career,
the protagonist Sybylla, who is a writer, paces around her family’s
Australian outback ranch house, reading what she has just written:
Dear fellow countrymen, just a few words to let you know that
this story is going to be all about me. So, in answer to many
requests, here is the story of my career … here is the story, of my
career … my brilliant career. I make no apologies for sounding
egotistical … because I am!
Directed, scripted and produced by women, My Brilliant Career is a

foremother of the films in this book as it ‘grants discursive authority
to a collective female voice outside the texts … [and] an alignment
of this voice with a female figure within the text’ (Thornham, 2012:
93). The woman writer, like Sybylla, may be the most recognizable
image of female authorship, but authors are not always writers. The
figure of the woman author in the films in this book appears in
many guises: as a writer, a photographer, a young videographer, a
playwright, a quilt maker, a sketch artist, a frustrated journalist, a
young girl who wants to be a writer, and two who steal stories from
their lovers. They may seem like they have little in common but
the potential to subvert and upend power relations is found in each
as they negotiate the difficulties of female agency and the desire to
authorize oneself while being a woman.
The structure of the book
Though this book limits its scope to films released since 1990, it is
not an historical survey of film adaptations made by women in the
contemporary period. Still, I am to some extent trying to histori-
cize the use of adaptations by women filmmakers in this particular
period by examining how they engage with the cultural politics of
female agency within the postfeminist context as outlined above.
Consequently, my analysis, as I have suggested above, is not just con-
cerned with textual analysis of the films but also the representation
of the women filmmakers themselves in the various discursive spaces
which contribute to the construction of their authorial identities –
reviews of the film adaptations as well as the director’s previous
work, published interviews with the filmmakers, scholarly criticism
on the films and on the directors. The films and filmmakers have
not all received the same amount of attention across these areas, nor
have they been equally productive. Some directors in this book have
made multiple films and others have directed only one or two, and
so I draw on what is available, and at times, what is not available is
part of the argument I make. The figure of the woman author holds
all these all these elements together. In her book The Acoustic Mirror:
The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, Kaja Silverman argues
in relation to women’s film authorship, ‘The crucial project with
respect to the female voice is to find a place from which it can speak
and be heard, not to strip it of discursive rights’ (2003: 192). In the
analyses that follow, my agenda to restore the discursive rights of
female authorship centres on the figure of the woman author who
often functions as that place from which the female voice ‘can speak
and be heard’.
This book can be seen as having two parts. The first, which encom-
passes Chapters 1 and 2, considers adaptations that have been
directed by women who at the point of making their adaptations
had acquired some tenuous discursive status as an auteur. All would
be classed as independent films due to their production contexts,
and all (though some more confidently than others) have been dis-
cussed in relation to Art cinema. The overarching emphasis in this
first half is on the adaptations as textual and extra-textual battle-
grounds for the authority of the woman filmmaker. The second part,
which encompasses Chapters 3 and 4, looks at adaptations that in
Introduction 17
their generic identities would be classified as popular films; in other

words, all have been labelled ‘chick flicks’. Those in Chapter 3 are
mainstream studio films, while those in Chapter 4 are independent
productions, both distributed by Sony Pictures Classics. In this half,
the analysis seeks to find the internal contradictions of the texts that
allow space for reading the feminist sensibilities within their popular
forms, while also taking into account their exclusion of women of
colour and lesbian women. The conclusion stands slightly apart as
I consider The Secret Life of Bees as a film adaptation by a woman
director that draws together the various issues raised throughout all
four chapters. More detailed descriptions of the chapters follow.
Chapter 1 considers two classic-novel adaptations from the 1990s
that add a female authorial figure in the film where there is none
in the novel: Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992) and Patricia Rozema’s
Mansfield Park (1999). By adding the figure of the female author, both
films reject the expectation of fidelity to the source novel, and they
each garnered much criticism for doing so. However, both Potter and
Rozema counter those criticisms in interviews in which they claim
their authority to make changes through their identification with the
authors Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen, expressing an intimacy with
them that I read through the metaphor of conversation.
The metaphor of collaboration is turned on its head in Chapter 2,
which examines contemporary-novel adaptations that include a
threatening male authorial figure. In Kathryn Bigelow’s The Weight
of Water (2000), Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar (2002), and Jane
Campion’s In the Cut (2003), each of the male authors dies and their
deaths allow the female authorial figures to survive. I consider their
deaths as metaphors for Barthes’ ‘The Death of the Author’, with
which the women filmmakers must contend in order to make their
own claim to authority. The female protagonists’ ability to survive
the threats against them reflects the directors’ ability to survive in
the male-dominated film industry.
Chapter 3 returns to the 1990s by analysing three popular film
adaptations: Gillian Armstrongs Little Women (1994), Joceylyn
Moorhouse’s How to Make an American Quilt (1995), and Callie
Khouri’s Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002). Each represents
sisterhood and mother-daughter relationships as metaphors and con-
duits for women’s authorship and agency. The textual representation
of women’s group relationships reflects the multiple women in the
films’ key production roles. These women’s films made by women

stand out in a contemporary Hollywood in which women in pro-
duction roles are still rare, and I argue that their collaboration in the
process of adaptation is a strategy for asserting the agency of their
collective female authorship.
The final chapter deals with the iconic figure of the woman author:
Jane Austen. In the new millennium, Austen’s novels have been
regularly adapted to contemporary settings, suggesting that she has
a continued appeal in postfeminist media culture. Chapter 4 thus con-
siders this popular appeal of Austen and how it functions for women
in the postfeminist context. Two films that foreground the Austen
fan-reader – Robin Swicord’s The Jane Austen Book Club (2007) and
Jerusha Hess’ Austenland (2013) – inevitably engage with the idea
of Austen’s popularity. My analysis of them shows how we might
understand Austen as the figure of the woman author who functions
as an outlet for contemporary women’s desire for agency and as a
symbol of women’s sublimated rage against postfeminist strictures.
I conclude the book with a look at Gina Prince-Bythewood’s
The Secret Life of Bees (2008), and I relate it to the previous films in
order to think about the place of the black woman filmmaker in
contemporary cinema. I argue that Prince-Bythewood’s adaptation
of a novel by a white woman (Sue Monk Kidd) productively shows
the subversive possibilities of adaptation because of the ways she
employs both identification and difference within the adaptation
process to imprint her authorial signature on the film. As such,
Prince-Bythewood’s film suggests that women filmmakers of colour,
who have been historically, doubly marginalized, can use adaptation
as a process to insert their voices into conversations from which they
have been excluded.
1
Envisioning Judith Shakespeare:
Collaboration and the Woman
Author
Judith Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf tells us, ‘died young and … never
wrote a word’ (A Room of One’s Own, 13). As the figure of the woman
author who was not allowed to express her creativity, her vision,
or herself because of the patriarchal world she lived in, Judith still
haunts us to this day. We know, of course, that cultural restrictions
on the ideals of femininity have always been (and continue to be)
used to hold back women’s ambitions. In the 1920 version of Careers
for Women, the screenwriter and film director Ida May Park declared,
‘Unless you are hardy and determined … the director’s role is not for
you … When the time comes I believe that women will find no finer
calling’ (Filene, 335). Though feminist film historians of early cin-
ema are continually discovering women working in key roles behind
the camera much like Ida May Park, there is no doubt that cinema
history is full of Judiths. We only have to look so far as the Annual
Celluloid Ceiling Report to see that the contemporary period is little
better; we might have hoped for more by now. The two directors of
the films in this chapter have spoken, recently, about the absence
of women filmmakers in interviews with Melissa Silverstein of the
Women and Hollywood blog. In response to questions about the sta-
tus of women directors in contemporary cinema, Sally Potter says,
‘Things have changed since I started. Look, I used to always be the
minority of one, maybe two, the token and that was tiresome and
difficult’ (Silverstein, 2012), and Patricia Rozema confesses, ‘When
I first saw Jane Campion’s The Piano I realized that my top-ten list
had all been men’ (Silverstein, 2008a). Both Potter’s and Rozema’s
comments suggest the same thing: that being a female director often
19
means being the only one (or maybe two). This chapter suggests that
in making film adaptations of novels of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, respectively, Potter and Rozema
sought collaboration with the two most well-known women authors
of the literary canon in order to have a conversation about women
authorizing themselves, instead of waiting for confirmation from the
patriarchy.
As Sonia Haiduc shows, the figure of the woman writer on screen
often inhabits a narrative of ‘the successful life’, presenting the act
of writing for the woman author in the films as ‘a self-authorizing
strategy in male-dominated culture’ (Haiduc, 2013: 51). Both films
in this chapter create female authors where there were none in the
source text. Consequently, the superimposition of the female writer
onto the narrative is a strategy for signalling the successful life of
the characters on screen, and, more importantly in my view, it is
also a self-authorizing strategy for the woman filmmaker. The two
are intertwined in their textual and extra-textual constructions.
Through analysis of the texts, the reception of the adaptations, and
interviews with each director, I will show that the female author
on screen, represents both the woman writer of the novel and the
woman filmmaker of the adaptation, while simultaneously repre-
senting the differences between them. As I have shown elsewhere,
male filmmakers who make adaptations can rely on the rhetoric of
production and paternity over reproduction and filialness to estab-
lish their authority over the text and to reinforce their authorial
originality (Cobb, 2012). In contrast, women do not have access
to the language of paternity or an easy relationship with the lan-
guage of production; for this, valid, reason feminist film critics have
historically been wary of individualized authorship and auteursist
approaches to cinema. Orlando and Mansfield Park complicate both
the representation of authorship and the act of authorship in a way
that sidesteps the masculinized discourses of authority. Both Potter
and Rozema present their film adaptations as collaborations that
move between identification and disidentification with the woman
novelist, constructing authorship and authority as a relational
process. Thus, this chapter can be seen as establishing the premise
of this book – namely, that women filmmakers’ adaptations that
include the figure of the woman author make a unique space for
analysing women’s film authorship.
Envisioning Judith Shakespeare 21
As I noted in the introduction, the early 1990s was a period

in which the current postfeminist media landscape was develop-
ing from the backlash discourse of the 1980s. Susan Faludi’s book
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women was published in 1991
and she appeared on the cover of Time magazine with Gloria Steinam
for the story, ‘Fighting the Backlash against Feminism: Susan Faludi
and Gloria Steinam Sound the Call to Arms’. This was also a period
of high-profile chick flicks. In 1990, Ghost was the second-highest
grossing film of the year and Pretty Woman the fourth. In 1991,
Father of the Bride was ninth-highest grossing film and Fried Green
Tomatoes the eleventh. In 1992, The Bodyguard was the seventh-
highest grossing film and A League of Their Own the tenth. It was, as
I note in the Introduction, also a time when some women filmmak-
ers moved from the avant-garde to more mainstream film styles and
some gained international recognition. The year that Jane Campion’s
The Piano was nominated for Best Picture and Best Director Oscars,
Orlando was also nominated for Best Costume and Best Art Direction.
As Christina Lane points out, several media outlets declared 1993 the
‘Year of the Woman’ on the independent film scene. She also points
out that the same had been said of 1989 and 1991, making the case
that women filmmakers always seem exceptional in part because
there are so few, but also because the few never turn into the many
(2005). The comments by Potter and Rozema above are suggestive
of the dichotomous experience of women filmmakers during that
period, when the numbers were low, per usual, but a new level of
exposure in the media and in a culture-making institution like the
Academy Awards suggested change. When Campion was nominated,
it had been 15 years since Lena Wertmuller was the first woman to
be nominated in the Best Director category in 1976. Her film was
nominated for Best Foreign Film, so Campion’s dual nomination
of Best Director and Best Film was another kind of first, and the
attention Campion’s film received was extraordinary. Ten years after
Campion’s nomination, Sofia Coppola became the first American
woman to be nominated for Best Director and her film Lost in
Translation for Best Picture. Again, media outlets heralded change for
women in film production.1 Six years later, in 2009, Kathryn Bigelow
won Best Director and Best Picture for The Hurt Locker, and the media
imagined that this could only mean change.2 To date, however, the
Academy has not nominated another woman for Best Director, nor
has a woman director won the Palme d’Or at Cannes since Campion
shared it with Chen Kaige in 1993. Together, Potter’s and Rozema’s
comments encapsulate the ‘status of women directors’ in the con-
temporary period: they are both inconspicuous by virtue of their low
numbers and made conspicuous through any one woman’s success.
The period after Campion’s nominations and before Coppola’s is
the context in which, according to Belén Vidal, several women made
‘literary films [that] invite the question of how authorship can be
reimagined in relationship to literary culture, feminism and the pop-
ular in order to enable the repetition and variation of performance –
and hence, the appropriation and “authoring” of the texts of the
past’ (Vidal, 2005: 270). As I have argued elsewhere, through the
example of Campion’s The Portrait of Lady, the ability of the film-
maker to translate that appropriation and authoring of the literary
text into an act of self-authorizing is not always corroborated by the
reception of the film, and the woman filmmaker is chastened by
what is a distinctly gendered language of fidelity (Cobb, 2012). In
the case of Campion and The Portrait of a Lady, the combination of
fidelity criticism and women’s difficulties in appropriating masculine
auteurist discourses made it seem ‘a perverse choice to adapt [Henry
James’s] novel’ because she was accused of being both unfaithful
to the novel and unfaithful to herself (McHugh, 2007: 108). Some
similar criticisms were levelled at Potter and Rozema for their adapta-
tions; this chapter explores how each filmmaker uses the identity of
Woolf and Austen as women authors in a feminist tradition to cre-
ate the figure of the woman author in the texts who embodies the
directors’ authorial signatures on the adaptations. This collaboration
with the women novelists not only creates a conversation about the
history of women’s authorship but also authorizes the women direc-
tors as individual auteurs by inserting them into that history.
Sally Potter’s Orlando
The final sequence of Sally Potter’s Orlando (1993) begins with the
intertitle BIRTH. It is the last of a series of intertitles that mark chron-
ological and character development throughout the film – 1600
DEATH, 1610 LOVE, 1650 POETRY, 1700 POLITICS, 1750 SOCIETY,
1850 SEX. BIRTH begins with Orlando at a meeting with an agent
who sets a large, disordered manuscript on his desk and says, ‘I think
it’ll sell. Provided you rewrite it of course. You know, increase the
love interest; give it a happy ending.’ He asks her how long it took
her to write, and she does not respond to him but only turns her eyes
to the camera, which fixates on her in close-up. The small turn of her
eyes affirms a knowingness between character and audience that is
a regular feature throughout the film as Orlando makes intermittent
direct addresses (both verbal and non-verbal) to the camera. Orlando
leaves the meeting on an early 1900s style motorcycle with a child in
the sidecar and drives through early 1990s London.3
They arrive at the English estate where Orlando began his life and
narrative. She lifts her child out of the sidecar and removes the hel-
met, revealing the long hair and face, of the girl child. The voiceover
says, ‘She, for there can be no doubt about her sex …’ (a gender
reversal of the voiceover at the beginning of the film which declares
in reference to Orlando, ‘He, for there can be no doubt about his
sex’) momentarily seems to refer to the child until it continues, ‘… is
visiting the house she finally lost for the first time in over a hundred
years.’ The house is now a part of the English heritage circuit, and
inside, they join tourists looking at a portrait of an Elizabethan-era
Orlando. The film then abruptly cuts to a black screen with static
and then cuts again to a hand-held camera moving quickly and
erratically through a dry grass field. In a long shot of the field we see
Orlando’s girl child. She runs about with a video recorder, filming the
countryside, and it becomes clear that the hand-held camera work
had been the girl’s point of view. The long shot had been the point of
view of Orlando at the tree; a close-up reveals a tear streaming down
her face, and then the film returns to the girl’s point of view through
the video camera. She shoots Orlando’s face in extreme close-up, her
mother’s eyes, nose, and mouth filling the screen. The child asks,
‘Why are you sad?’ to which Orlando responds, ‘I’m not. I’m happy.
Look. Look up there.’ And then the girl’s video camera points to the
sky where an angel (played by Jimmy Somerville) sings about being
free of the past and destiny and gender and mortality.4 The film cuts
from the camcorder point of view to a close-up of Orlando, looking
directly at the audience, nearly expressionless and yet serene.
Orlando has been analysed and interpreted many times, but by
focusing on the figure of the author, I read the film, through its
ending, as a cinematic vision of matrilineal legacy that not only
connects women authors across time and history but also across
media and disciplines by considering it through Virginia Woolf’s

claim that, ‘For we think back through our mothers if we are women’
(Woolf, 1929: 76), and Potter’s own explanation of the ending:
I could be a mother, but I’m not. But many women are and will
be, and there will be another generation of daughters, and so the
issue is much more about the future and continuity and literally
inheritance … At the end there is another kind of inheritance that
becomes possible. I’m certainly well aware of how I’m standing on
my mother’s shoulders and grandmother’s shoulders – what I was
able to do that they weren’t able to do, what they gave to me, and
what was taken from them. (Florence, 1993: 282)
Both Woolf and Potter use the mother-daughter metaphor, which

has been a matter of much debate in feminist theory, to evoke a
specifically matrilineal narrative of history and identity. Both use the
metaphor in the context of thinking about women’s authorship and
its possibilities as well as the limits history has placed on women.
Woolf’s words and her own work in ‘making known the writing
of women whose existence had previously been obscured, covered
over by the weight of the masculine canon’, inspired in feminist
literary theory and criticism an ‘industry on a large scale’ invested
in continuing the work of making women authors known (Bowlby,
1997: 22–23). Seminal works in this area were produced during the
growth in feminist theory’s incursion into academia in the late 1970s
and through the 1980s and include Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of
Their Own and Sandra Gilbert’s and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in
the Attic. Feminist film theory and criticism also has worked to make
women filmmakers known, and seminal works in this area are Claire
Johnston’s ‘Dorothy Arzner: Critical Strategies’ and Annette Kuhn’s
Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema, amongst others.5 The stark
difference between these works on women writers and women film-
makers is that the literary critics have written a narrative of tradition
for their authors creating for them a clear, historical development;
while, in contrast, film criticism has not written a parallel tradition
for women filmmakers.6 There are multiple reasons for this, but for
the period in which these books were written the most obvious and
important and practical one is the historical lack of women directors
during the classical Hollywood period (that period being the main
focus of early film studies) and the marginalization of the few

who did exist in auteur histories of Hollywood.7 In addition, many
women filmmakers were lost, and some will be forever missing, from
the historiography of cinema because of both sexist attitudes and the
difficulties (and mismanagement by some studios) of archiving early
film, a state of affairs that has only recently begun to change.8
Rachel Bowlby offers a reading of Woolf’s ideas on female tradi-
tions that I think is suggestive for thinking about how the adapta-
tions, in this book, that foreground the figure of the woman author
represent the possibilities and difficulties of women’s authorship in
contemporary cinema:
Another turn to the process of thinking back through our mothers

is suggested by Woolf’s fable of Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister
Judith … The fictional reconstruction highlights the fact that it is
impossible to know whether such a sister did or did not exist, since
what it relates is nothing else than how she would have been pre-
vented from doing anything worthy of historical ‘note’ … Women
also think back, perhaps, through the very fact of having ‘no tra-
dition behind them’: think back through the absence of mothers.
(1997: 24, emphasis in the original)
Women filmmakers, to use Woolf’s words metaphorically, ‘have been

prevented from doing anything worthy of historical “note”’, whether
that was the prevention of ‘doing’ something (e.g. the severe lack of
directors in the classical Hollywood period) or the disappearance of
anything done because it was not considered worthy (e.g. the sup-
pression of the many women directors, writers, and producers of the
silent period or the way film history marginalizes ‘women’s jobs’ in
filmmaking – hair/makeup/costume/casting). At the time of Orlando’s
production in the early 1990s, the need to make fictional filmmak-
ing foremothers might have been particularly strong because of the
modest knowledge about women in the early period of film history
and the extremely few women directing in classical Hollywood (and
the lack of recognition for screenwriters at the time).9 By focusing on
the end of Orlando, I want to suggest that Potter uses the adaptation
process to fill the absences in her own tradition by making a connec-
tion to a prominent woman author of another tradition and to offer
herself as a mother to future metaphorical filmmaking daughters.
However, like biological mother-daughter relationships, metaphor-

ical matrilineal traditions can harbour tension. Foremothers, even
those actively sought out by their daughters, may be examples of
inspiration, but they can also be tough competitors and foster unat-
tainable ideals, exemplified by Woolf’s Angel in the House: ‘when
I came to write … she made as if to guide my pen … I did my best
to kill her … had I not … she would have killed me’ (Woolf, 1979:
58–60). In regards to these contradictory images of relations amongst
women Hermione Lee asks:
Should we think through our mothers, or kill them? Must we kill

the ghosts for whom we feel … such a fatal attraction, who are
always creeping back to life when we thought they were dead?
And does ‘thinking through’ mean well or ill: Do we learn from
our mothers, or react against and reject them? (1997: 79)
For Woolf, the Angel in the House created a kill or be killed situa-
tion. She describes the metaphorical Angel as ghost-like, haunting
her with admonitions of how she should and should not write
and cautioning other women to ‘never let anybody guess that you
have a mind of your own’ (Woolf, 1979: 59). It is as if the Angel
attempts to suck the air out of Woolf’s hard-won ‘room of her own’.
She feels she has no choice but to enact violence in order to keep
‘a mind of her own’ – necessary to ‘review even a novel’, necessary
to write, necessary for an author (1979: 59). Potter has also evoked
a metaphor of violence in her process of authoring the adaptation
of Woolf’s novel: ‘I learnt that you have to be cruel to the novel to
be kind to the film’ (Donohue, 1993: 218). She does not describe
Virginia Woolf, in particular, as the Angel in the House, haunting
her, constricting her mind, tampering with her authority over the
adaptation. And yet, the terms of her statement suggest that in the
process of filmmaking she was haunted by the expectations of a
‘faithful’ adaptation. She says that, after reading the novel several
times, researching its origins, and reading other Woolf material
from the same time period, she ‘put the book away entirely for at
least the last year of writing and treated the script as something in
its own right, as if the book had never existed … What I had to find
was a live, cinematic form, which meant being ruthless with the
novel’ (Donohue, 1993: 218). Potter may have chosen Woolf and
her novel to adapt, to think back through and to learn from, having
a conversation about the legacy of authorship, but she chooses also
to react against her, to rebel, to be cruel in order to make her own
mark on that legacy.
Some critics have seen Potter’s adaptation of Orlando as a distanc-
ing of herself from feminism (and the feminist avant-garde film
movement of the 1970s and 1980s to which she had been central).
After having been exiled from filmmaking for ten years when her
first feature film The Gold Diggers (1983) was critically panned and
made a scapegoat by critics of government art funding, it is possible
to read the adaptation as a way of engaging with the continuities
and conflicts of feminist generations in a cultural context inclined to
discount and vilify feminist politics and feminists in all areas of cul-
tural production.10 In the ways she speaks about the novel, the film,
and Woolf, Potter negotiates the particularities of her postfeminist
present by negotiating the language of fidelity and matrilineal lega-
cies in a way that potentially subverts the hierarchies in which they
function. At the centre of this self-authorizing project is the figure
of the woman author, who appears in various forms: Orlando, her
daughter, Potter, Woolf, and, though Potter does not use her name,
generations of Judiths.
Matrilineal generations
Considering the fact that, historically, women filmmakers have been

marginalized, both in the practice of filmmaking and in the histo-
riography of cinema, it perhaps should be not so surprising that so
many of them in the 1990s found company and collaboration with
women writers and characters of the past.11 Let me pause briefly
to point out that not all adaptations by women in the 1990s were
made from novels of the long nineteenth century, or, as it is often
referred to, ‘the past’. In Chapter 3 I discuss adaptations of con-
temporary 1990s novels by women adapted by women filmmakers
that particularly embody a cross media image of collaboration and
company. Still, classic-novel adaptations, especially if they choose
the mise en scène of the heritage film, raise expectations of fidelity,
and many filmmakers who make adaptations try to negotiate the
expectations and language of fidelity, both to the source text and the
author. Potter never actually uses the word ‘faithful’ to describe her
film. She describes the adaptation process, and by implication her

negotiation of the pressure to be faithful, a ‘strange game’ (Donohue,
1993: 12). Playing this ‘strange game’ around the language of fidelity
is not unique to Potter (Rozema takes a similar tack as we shall see
below). However, she plays the game not just to combat the critiques
of the film, but also to do something larger, namely establish herself
within a Woolfian female authorial tradition and to assert her own
authorial identity. In fact, she invokes Woolf as an example of her
choice to disregard the standard of faithfulness: ‘as Virginia Woolf
took a step away from her source material, which is really what Vita
was, and transformed Vita’s life into a novel, the film takes several
steps away from the book’ (Florence, 1993: 282–283). In this way, she
combats the strictures of fidelity by claiming affinity with what she
sees as Woolf’s own infidelity to the ‘facts’ of Vita Sackville West’s
life.12 Ultimately, she uses the language of relationship to justify her
‘infidelities’ when she says, ‘I knew the book well enough [and] was
enough in touch with its spirit, that it would have been a disservice
to be slavish to it’ (Donohue, 1993: 10). This confidence in her
connection to the novel is further bolstered by her ability ‘to think
myself into Virginia Woolf’s consciousness’ (Donohue, 1993: 223).
Some critics are uncomfortable with Potter’s metaphorical ‘mind-
meld’. In the Women’s Review of Books Jane Marcus is adamant that
she ‘can’t believe anyone who helped with the making of this mock-
ery of genius has ever read the book … or they would not have dared
to desecrate it’ (1998). Susan Watkins argues that ‘Woolf’s novel is
much more ambivalent – and thus more radical – about gender iden-
tity, than Potter’s film, partly because Woolf unharnesses theories of
gender identity from any specific feminist agenda’ (1998: 44). While
Karen Hollinger and Theresa Winterhalter argue that by ‘claiming
fidelity to Woolf, Potter manages to cloak her divorce from femi-
nism under an assertion of loyalty to her feminist roots’ (2001: 254,
emphasis mine). I emphasize the words divorce and loyalty here to
show that debates about fidelity in adaptation often do, in academic
discourse in particular, what they are doing here: expressing concern
for ‘keeping the faith’ with something else than the text. Potter’s
earlier films are often referenced as key feminist texts in discussions
of Orlando either to make a connection between her foundations in
feminist filmmaking or, as the critics above do, suggest that Potter
‘shatters’ the feminist subtleties of Orlando and that she ‘abandons’
feminism all together (2001: 254). Hollinger and Winterhalter con-

clude that ‘[Potter] looked to Woolf, as … so many feminists do, as
a favorite cultural icon, the maternal figure through whom feminist
criticism turns out mirror images of itself’ (2001: 254–256).
Mothers, and their importance in the creation, maintenance, and
empowerment of a matrilineal legacy, even history, of female author-
ship that stands in opposition to the dominant patriarchal discourse
hold a significant place in feminist criticism, and the presupposed
primacy of ‘mother-and-daughterhood’ over ‘sisterhood’ neces-
sitated that the sisterhood find its mother. In Virginia Woolf they
found the granddame of them all:
By the early 1970s, the emerging women’s movement had made

Woolf’s words – ‘a room of one’s own’, for instance – into public
slogans and her face, emblazoned on T-shirts, into a public sight.
By the middle of the decade, feminist literary critics in the acad-
emy had begun to make their mark; at conferences (1974) and
later in journals (1977) … they declared and presented to their
skeptical colleagues ‘Another Version of Virginia Woolf’, one that
foregrounded her political, social, and feminist concerns. (Silver,
1999: 9)
Brenda Silver’s book Virginia Woolf: Icon develops a detailed argu-

ment of the multifaceted iconicity of Woolf that has been alternately
appropriated by intellectuals, conservatives, modernists, postmod-
ernists, artists, popular culture, and feminism. Her argument for
the multi-valenced quality of Woolf would seem to deconstruct any
sense of her as an author. But her argument that ‘all sides’ of femi-
nism ‘claim Virginia Woolf as their authority, locating their feminist
politics in her own’ opens up the possibility of seeing authorship
and intertextuality as inextricably linked (Silver, 1999: 121). In other
words, in the case of Orlando, Potter’s authorial marks intersect with
Woolf’s authorial marks in the intertextual Orlando resulting in the
further identification of each as authorial and authoritative.
In her book Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage,
Elaine Showalter examines ‘feminist icons’ from Mary Wollestonecraft
to Princess Diana. She argues in her introduction that ‘Women who
became feminist icons and leaders tended to define themselves in
opposition to their mothers’, and then she quotes Lorna Sage: ‘If you
look for the provenance of the feminist writer … mother is key …

you aim your feminism less at men than at the picture of the woman
you don’t want to be, the enemy within’ (Showalter, 2002: 18). This
accords with Showalter’s comments on Woolf above, but it also plays
into the generational conflict that often appears in feminist discourse,
forcing definitions of feminism that ignore historical contingencies.
Both Woolf and Potter created their Orlandos during times, to use Susan
Faludi’s title, of Backlash (Potter’s film was released the same year that
Faludi’s book was published). Similarly in Virginia Woolf and the Real
World, Alex Zwerdling describes the cultural environment in which
Woolf wrote: ‘The twenty years after the vote was won was a period
of retrenchment in the women’s movement. [The suffrage movement]
also created a conservative backlash’ (Zwerdling, 1986: 215, emphasis
mine). As Faludi points out, it is a feature of the twentieth century
that each gain in the women’s movement has been followed by a con-
servative backlash: ‘If we trace these [backlashes] in history, we find
such flare-ups are hardly random; they have always been triggered by
the perception … that women are making great strides’ (Faludi, 1992:
13). And each backlash blames feminism itself for all the ills that
plague women, ‘its rhetoric charges feminists with all the crimes it
perpetrates’ (Faludi, 1992: 17). Faludi also points out that in the face
of the purported ‘man shortage’, ‘fertility crisis’, and ‘mental health
problems’ created by women’s ‘so-called’ progress, ‘saying one is “not
a feminist” (even while supporting quietly every item of the feminist
platform) seems the most prudent, self-protective strategy’, and con-
cedes that ‘To expect each woman … to take a solitary feminist stand
is asking too much’ (Faludi, 1992: 80). In the end, she quotes Virginia
Woolf: ‘If I were to overcome the conventions … I should need the
courage of a hero, and I am not a hero’ (Faludi, 1992: 80).
And yet, for many women (especially women who are academics,
critics, artists, and intellectuals) Woolf is a hero, and when Potter
screened her ‘manifesto-like’ Thriller, she became a hero for women
as well. Furthermore, as Stacy Gillis and Rebecca Munford argue,
there are problems with a feminist historiography that views twenti-
eth century feminism as a succession of generational waves that have
peaks and troughs:
the trouble with this model [of waves] is that generations are set
up in competition with one another and definitions of feminism
are positioned around the ‘leaders’ of these generations, whether

it be the Pankhursts, Gloria Steinem or Germaine Greer. Current
feminist figures are compared incessantly (and unfavourably) with
these past ‘leaders’. (Gillis and Munford, 2004: 165)
That a woman might not be comfortable with the role of feminist-

hero, no matter how much she supports the movement and its goals,
inevitably causes discomfort for other feminist women. In a 1993
interview, Potter responds to the question of whether or not she still
sees her work as feminist:
I can’t use the word any more because it’s become debased.
My simple observation is that if I use it, it stops people from
thinking … So I now try to find more subtle ways, more indirect
or appropriate ways to the individual or the circumstance to
express some of those ideas … There’s a tendency to move away
from using that kind of language. I think it’s about being cleverer,
more effective, and moving out of a sort of ghetto mentality and
away from didacticism, and I don’t think any of those things
can be bad. And anyway language needs to keep refreshing itself
perpetually. (Florence, 279–280)
I want to suggest that female artists like Woolf and Potter, whether
consciously or unconsciously, dodge the term ‘feminism’ and mute
the rhetoric during times of backlash in order to keep the language
from being used against them. For Potter at least, a subversion of
the expectations on her to be a feminist icon coincides with her
challenges to the languages of fidelity and legacy.
In the Introduction to this book, I suggested a metaphor of
conversation as a feminist-inflected way of thinking about adapta-
tions and women’s authorship. As the editors of Sisterhoods: Across
the Literature/Media Divide observe, feminists, ‘sometimes actively
disagree about the radicalness of a particular perspective or strategy.
Nowhere do these debates become more tense than when the object
of study is an avowed feminist herself’ (Cartmell et al., 1998: 6).
Much of the early criticism of Orlando seems intent on judging
Potter’s feminism without much self-consciousness that feminism
and feminist history is an ongoing process of disidentification and
identification. Potter’s conversation with fidelity, feminism, and
Woolf, holds this process of disidentification and identification

in the balance, leaving feminist criticism of Orlando to choose to
engage with that process or not. Potter’s simultaneous identification
and disidentification with female authorial and feminist legacies
offers a model of conversation with those legacies. Instead of the
one-way traffic of the generational and wave metaphors, conversa-
tion creates interaction and revaluation both down and up the line
of these women’s traditions.
Putting on the woman author’s body
Instead of critiquing Potter for her changes in plot and theme and
for re-reading Woolf’s novel and feminism through her own medium
and experience of feminism, these are the moments that ought to be
considered in terms of her agency as a filmmaker. Potter’s changes to
the end of the narrative return us to the mother/daughter metaphor
that, above, critics use against Potter. Instead of returning Orlando
to her beloved Knole estate via the birth of her son and a vision of
her husband Shelmerdine leaping to the earth, the film ends with
Orlando visiting Knole, which is now a home on the heritage circuit,
as woman writer and mother to a little girl with a video camera.
Hollinger and Winterhalter argue that Woolf’s choice of a male heir
is a ‘warning that male power is still at large as a destructive force
in the world’ and that the film’s end softens this political critique
(2001: 252). However, I think we should see the end of Potter’s film
through the figure of the woman author with which this chapter
began: Judith Shakespeare. As quoted above, Woolf says she ‘died
young and … never wrote a word’: a victim of both the Angel in the
House and ‘Milton’s bogey’ (Woolf, 1929: 113). Yet, later in A Room
of One’s Own Woolf writes,
my belief is that if we live another century or so … and have five

hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the
habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think …
if we face the fact … that we go alone and that our relation is to the
world of reality and not only to the world of men and women,
then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was
Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often
laid down. (Woolf, 1929: 113–114)
If considered intertextually with A Room of One’s Own, which would

have been included in Potter’s voracious ‘re-reading what [Woolf]
had written after Orlando; her thoughts on issues post-1928’, the end
of the film can be read as Potter’s resurrection of her own version of
Judith Shakespeare: or, we might think of her as ‘Judith Hitchcock’,
the fictional sister of Alfred Hitchcock who had a filmmaker’s vision
but whose ‘parents came in and told her to mend the stockings
or mind the stew and not moon about’ the cinema, or as ‘Judith
Griffiths’, the fictional sister of D.W. Griffiths, who represents the
women of silent cinema whose names, until recently, were anony-
mous footnotes in film history, and many of whose films have been
permanently lost (Woolf, 1929: 147; Donohue, 1993: 223).
In the final moments of the film, which I describe at the begin-
ning of this chapter, the insistent and unwavering close-up of Tilda
Swinton’s face frames her so that she is dead centre. Swinton’s face is
serene, but her unblinking eyes seem to demand respect for Orlando’s
journey toward this ‘happy’ place where ‘if she doesn’t quite kill the
angel in the house, she questions some of her assumptions’ (Ouditt,
1999: 155). Swinton’s Orlando stares into the camera while leaning
against the large oak tree on her former property. The close-up is shot
in such a way that the tree fills the background behind her. It is the
same tree that appears in the opening of the film, the backdrop for
the audience’s introduction to Orlando, as a man, pacing in front of
it, reading someone else’s poetry. The final close-up resonates with
the first close-up of Orlando when he sits under the same tree and
responds to the voice over with his statement ‘That is, I.’ The main
difference between the two is that the first close-up begins with the
camera positioned to the side of Orlando. We only see his profile
and, behind him the oak tree that fills the frame, until he turns to
make the direct address into the camera. There are several close-ups
of Swinton throughout the film, often when she directly addresses
the camera, but only the close-ups at the beginning and the end
have the repetitive use of the oak tree. The Oak Tree in the novel is
the poem Orlando has been writing all his/her life. The manuscript
Orlando offers for publication in the film is less specified, although
it is implied that it is likely a novel by the way the editor suggests
that she cut some parts and develop the love interest. It may also
be implied, by the knowing look Swinton gives the camera after the
editor asks her how long it took to write, that the subject is Orlando’s
life. As a man, Orlando’s poetry is vilified, but as a woman she is

published, although potentially censored by ‘market’ considerations
in the film. Orlando as male poet, leaning against the oak tree, is
framed in profile at the beginning of the film and must turn to speak
to the camera to say ‘That is, I’ when the voiceover refers to him as ‘he’
Orlando as woman looks straight at us without a word, subverting the
traditional gender-biased notions of self-assertion, needing no affir-
mation from the voiceover and no clarification from herself. It is an
image in complete opposition to the Angel in the House and in defi-
ance of patriarchy especially as she watches her daughter who holds
the camera, free to run about the field, filming whatever she wants.
Maggie Humm identifies the characteristic playfulness of postmod-
ernism and the politics of feminism through the spectacle of ‘Jimmy
Sommerville’s hovering angel harking back to his falsetto song for
Queen Elizabeth … the reference is to Walter Benjamin’s Thesis on
the Philosophy of History … in the … image of history as an angel
being blown backwards into the future’ (Humm, 1997: 170). The
song that the angel sings speaks of ‘becoming’ and in a playful way
breaks the binaries of woman/man, earth/outerspace/, being born/
dying, and past/future. Humm sees the ending more positively, as
I do, and suggests that ‘the song is a perfect anti-closure device. What
the film’s ending does is to problematize the fiction of a traditional
“happy ending” while simultaneously foregrounding that possibility
through the video camera of Orlando’s little girl’ (Humm, 1997: 170).
Other less sanguine critics have suggested that by giving Orlando
a girl child and therefore severing Orlando from her inheritance,
the film contributes to a stereotypical ending in fiction and films
for women that asserts motherhood as the path to ‘true meaning’
(Dowell, 252).13 But seeing the ending, of what is hardly a conven-
tional narrative film, in this way ignores the possibility of seeing it
as a call by Potter for ‘women to take up our inheritance’ (Dowell,
1993: 252). Orlando at the end of the film is a published writer who
is being filmed by her daughter. For a few moments the image of
Orlando that the audience sees is the view of Orlando through her
daughter’s camera, the daughter who might someday make a film
of her mother’s extraordinary life, the daughter who might put on
the body of Judith. Orlando’s daughter in the film embodies the
hopefulness of that legacy: ‘why did I change it from being a boy
child in the book to a girl child in the film, and why is that girl
holding a camera? … if I really reveal my true heart, it’s all of our

daughters, or it’s me, or our futures, and so on’ (Florence, 1993: 281).
If we return to Humm’s reading of the Somerville’s angel as the
Angel of History being blown back into the future, we can read the
end not only as the hope for future women filmmakers but also has
the hope for the (re)discovery of early women filmmakers through
the developments of the present, the present context of Orlando
being the movement of female filmmakers like Potter from the oppo-
sitional place of the avant-garde to a place closer to the mainstream,
a move which has necessitated reconsidering women’s authorship,
as I noted in the Introduction of this book. Somewhat convolut-
edly, I want to echo Jennifer M. Bean who ‘echo[s] Annette Kuhn
and Jackie Stacey’ (echoing Alison Butler and Walter Benjamin) in
reminding us that ‘rather than being simply “about the past” in any
straightforward way, screen histories are of necessity concerned with
past-present relations with a view to the future’ (Bean and Negra,
2002: 9). At the end of Orlando, the figure of the woman writer acts
as a different kind of ‘Angel’ presiding over the possibility of wom-
en’s cinematic authorship. By aligning herself with Woolf through
Orlando, Potter imagines female agency through authorship and
maternal legacies. Potter’s identification with Woolf and, hence, a
larger history of authorship, of both known women and unknown
women, also acts to ‘put on the body’ of Judith Shakespeare: ‘Now
my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried
at the crossroads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many
other women who are not here tonight’ (Woolf, 1929: 113). The
intertextuality of the adaptation, then, upholds Woolf, Potter, and
Orlando as figures within a long line of women authors. The adapta-
tion invites the audience members to recognize this legacy within
which Judith lives. Swinton’s final, sustained look at the camera
presses the audience to acknowledge Orlando’s change and develop-
ment into a woman of agency who has found her own happiness,
a proposition that Potter might very well support: ‘That’s a word
I love. Recognition. That’s my intention, to create on screen that
sense of recognition of the self, of the hidden or unspoken self, giv-
ing voice to something that’s been unspoken or suppressed in some
way. Rendering visible’ (Florence, 1993: 282). What Orlando renders
visible as an adaptation is women’s authorship, and Potter has given
it voice and visibility.
When asked in the early 1990s ‘how do you perceive, now, the
particular problems women directors face in the film industry as a
whole’ she responded:
I’m thoroughly against complaining about it. I feel I’ve done my

grieving and mourning and being angry, and the proper place for
that is in private. I think that now for me in public the proper
thing to do is to model being effective and powerful. But of course
it’s tough … I think the problems are almost entirely about getting
the opportunities to attain a position of power through gaining
the trust of investors. Getting the money and opportunities, that’s
the tough bit. (Florence, 1993: 282)
These sentiments, of course, evoke Woolf’s ‘room of one’s own’

and 300–500 pounds a year necessary for the woman writer. The
harsh reality is that it is not just the lack of female companionship
and camaraderie that makes filmmaking difficult for women; it is
the patriarchal system of production, ‘the investors’, who are almost
always all men. The low number of women filmmakers is used as an
excuse by the men in power not to trust women with their money;
however it also obvious that it is those in power who keep those
numbers low. Feminists have always advocated working collectively
against the patriarchy. When a woman is the ‘only one’ in any given
situation, conjuring Judith may be a matter of survival.
Patricia Rozema’s Mansfield Park
In his article, ‘Which Shakespeare to Love? Film, Fidelity and the

Performance of Literature’, Timothy Corrigan argues against the many
critics who charge heritage-style film adaptations with nostalgia:
the contemporary [postmodern] environment riddled with social,

historical, and subjective fragmentation, dislocations and hyper-
realisms … is haunted by the dream, if not the memory, of coher-
ency and clarity … [in this environment] nineteenth-century
literature’s characters and narratives, as well as Shakespearean
drama, become compensations for the perceived abandonment
of grand or coherent narratives, spatial condensations and expan-
sions, and personal paralysis or unmotivated characters that seem
to describe much of contemporary life. (2002: 166)
He then suggests that the author in these texts is the ‘ideal figure
of human agency [and] the active making of meaning in the midst
of our hypertextual culture’ (2002: 166). Rozema’s Mansfield Park
exemplifies what he means:
In the twisted adaptation … the heroine thus becomes the author

whose additions to the novel are an elaborated engagement barely
mentioned in Austen’s original: at the center of this adaptation,
Fanny/Austen confronts her father’s (sic) despicable and ruthless
colonialism, and so makes the agency of authorship a power-
ful tool against colonialism and for the claims of postcolonial
identity politics. And, of course, a good marriage. (2002: 166)
This, then, is the author as ideal figure of human agency for our
present brought to life, so to speak, through the process of adapta-
tion. Fanny/Austen, as Corrigan and others would have it, fulfils
the image of idealized individual agency by being both author and
character, which is brought about by the adaptation process: con-
ducted, of course, by the writer-director of the adaptation Patricia
Rozema. Within most of the scholarship on the film, like much
traditional adaptation scholarship, the author at stake in the text
is the literary author. Even for critics concerned with showing that
the film’s changes and additions are ‘part and parcel of [a feminist]
reading of “Jane Austen”’, Rozema exists only in name and it is ‘the
film’ that rhetorically has agency within the analysis (Aragay, 2003:
182). Belén Vidal’s interest in the adaptation is most closely aligned
with my own when she concludes that ‘the result [of Mansfield Park’s
intertextuality] is a mise en abyme of writing: a game of mirrors in
which Fanny Price becomes not only the reflection of “Jane Austen,
writer” but of “Patricia Rozema, rewriter”’ (2005: 275). However,
Vidal does not include Rozema’s own voice in her argument, either
through interviews or previous films she has made. In her reading,
‘the film sets to both evoke and reframe its literary intertext through
the intertextual play suggested by the textures of the images’ (2005:
271, emphasis mine).
As I argued in relation to Potter’s Orlando above, the figure whose
self-authorization is most at stake in Mansfield Park, for me, is the
woman filmmaker’s. And at the beginning of this chapter, I noted,
the battle over authorship in classic-novel adaptations is particularly
fraught and often relies on a gendered language that can put the
woman author, both literary and cinematic, at a disadvantage. But

these adaptations with the figure of the woman author in the text
allow us to see the relationship, or, as I have been suggesting, the
conversation, between the two authors as one that not only appro-
priates, rewrites, and embodies the literary author but also adapts,
reflects, and asserts the authority of the cinematic author. As another
textual figure of authorship, the woman filmmaker, then, can be
and should be read into the text and as a text herself. By looking at
Fanny/Austen in the text in connection with Rozema’s comments
about authorship and adaptation, we can reread the self-authorizing
narrative of Mansfield Park as a self-authorizing narrative of the
woman filmmaker as well.
Mansfield Park was released four years after the ‘Austen boom’
of film and television adaptations, which was such a cultural phe-
nomenon that Entertainment Weekly put Jane on the cover of their
1995 ‘Power Issue’. Clueless (a loose adaptation of Emma), Sense and
Sensibility (Ang Lee), and Persuasion (Roger Michell) all appeared in
the cinemas in 1995, and, of course, the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice,
with its infamous wet t-shirt Darcy, aired in the Autumn of that year
in the UK.14 In his book Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary
Culture Became Popular Culture, Jim Collins makes the argument that
media discourses declaring ‘the book’ dead due to the rise of digital
readers, the distractions of the internet, and the popularity of film
and television miss the fact that literature, and novels in particular,
have a central place in our increasingly mediated culture. And he
makes the case that film adaptations contributed to the rise of a
popular literary culture in the 1990s. In relation to the popularity
of Austen though, he suggests, I think rightly, that actual familiarity
with the novels themselves was not necessary:
Jane Austen would not have been a key figure in Entertainment

Weekly’s ‘Power’ issue if the audience for Austen films were lim-
ited to viewers eager to see just how faithful those adaptations
of Emma, Sense and Sensibility, and Mansfield Park really were.
Austen’s celebrity cannot be even addressed by the old fidelity
discourse because her popularity involves industry, audience, and
taste considerations that have no place within that old interpre-
tive game. (Collins, 2010: 131)
The Entertainment Weekly power issue with an image of ‘Jane Austen’

lounging by a pool, on a mobile phone, with Variety at her side,
came out in the Autumn of 1995, and it largely gestures to the glut
of Austen adaptations in the mid-1990s as something to look for-
ward to: Sense and Sensibility was about to be released in the United
States in December; Emma was slated for the following summer,
and to keep American audiences going in between, the BBC’s Pride
and Prejudice would be aired on the A&E Network in January 1996.
As much as Austen’s celebrity might have been a factor in Harvey
Weinstein and Miramax producing Mansfield Park, when it appeared
in cinemas in 1999, it was inevitably somewhat removed from the
height of that phenomenon by virtue of time alone.
Additionally, three Henry James film adaptations appeared within
a two-year period after the Austen boom and before Mansfield Park:
The Portrait of a Lady (Jane Campion, 1996), The Wings of the Dove
(Iain Softley, 1997), and Washington Square (Agnieska Holland, 1997).
None were as financially successful as the most successful Austen
adaptations. Anne-Marie Scholz points out that they were not dis-
cussed as part of a ‘Henry James boom’ in the reception discourse,
and, rightly, suggests that this is because they were not linked to the
contemporary postfeminist politics that situated the Austen films
as evidence of traditional longings of ‘liberated women’ (Scholz,
2013: 164). She shows that the two groups of films were discussed in
relation to each other through ‘the rhetoric of “complexity” [which]
served to distinguish James dramatizations from the Austen drama-
tizations, or Henry James the “modernist” from “costume dramas”
in general’ (Scholz, 2013: 165). Consequently, the James adaptation
trend in the years between Emma (Douglast McGrath, 1996) and
Mansfield Park served to reinforce the idea of Austen adaptations as
popular and accessible. In the fourth chapter of this book, I consider
more closely the notion of Jane Austen’s authorship as uniquely
popular and accessible, and the ways that postfeminist media cul-
ture uses her iconicity to articulate the contradictory pressures on
women’s agency in the twenty-first century. The important thing
to note about Mansfield Park is that most of the reviews and the
subsequent critical analyses agree that it is not like the films of the
‘Austen boom’. It is a film that for one reviewer ‘scrap[es] away the
Hollywood gloss that traditionally accrues to screen adaptations of
Austen’ and for another ‘is perversely experimentalist and frankly

preposterous’ (Holden, 1999; Bradshaw, 2000). The key change from
the novel to the film is that the least liked of all Austen characters,
Fanny Price, who is often described as an extremely shy and timid, is,
in the film, more witty and energetic like Elizabeth Bennet. Rozema
makes this change by making Fanny an author like Austen, and in
fact, uses Austen’s juvenilia and letters to give Fanny a voice. Pamela
Church Gibson suggests that its ‘complete reinvention of the central
protagonist and its deployment of innovative cinematic techniques’,
as well as its ‘overtly postcolonial polemic’ and its queering of the
heritage genre, were widely misunderstood by critics and scholars
(Gibson, 2004: 51).
More recently, scholarly interest in the writer on screen regularly
cites Mansfield Park alongside films like Shakespeare in Love ( John
Madden, 1998) as key films that foreground the figure of the author.
For some scholars, the author-character in the text ‘is the most ideal
figure of human agency … [and] an active meaning making presence’
(Corrigan, 2002: 166). For others, the author-character more simply
‘works in part as a marketing tool, a promotional hook, a brand
name’ (Higson, 2013: 112).15 But, the figure of the woman author
often carries extra, particularly gendered, cultural meaning because
her authorial identity is often ‘fram[ed] … in ways that work as both
affirmation and subversion of the assumptions of romance’ (Haiduc,
2013: 51), which constructs her identity. The initial representations
of Fanny’s youthful storytelling to her sister, which turns into writ-
ing at Mansfield Park and culminates in the publication of her novel
at the conclusion of the film, sets the foundation for which becom-
ing a writer is a ‘self-authorizing’ project, one in which her ‘career as
an artist plays an integral role in her development towards a position
of personal autonomy’ (Monaghan, 2006: 61). Her coming of age is
complete at the end when the newly married Fanny and Edmund
walk toward their home and he tells her that he has acquired a
publisher for her ‘stories’, combining the signifiers of Austen the
published writer and Austen’s novels that end in marriage.
Fanny’s authorship as it is configured through Austen is done in
two main ways: the script uses Austen’s juvenilia and letters when
Fanny writes stories or letters; and it draws on Austen’s biography.
Fanny’s brief acceptance of Henry Crawford, before rejecting him
outright, in the film is borrowed from a, much debated, episode in
Austen’s life. And by making her sister Susie her confidant rather
than William her brother (as he is in the novel), the script draws
on Austen’s close relationship with her sister Cassandra to whom
the author wrote many letters (and who infamously burned the vast
majority of them). Many critics connect these changes to Fanny’s
character with key moments in the narrative when Fanny speaks
out against her uncle: first, when she tells him that she will not
marry Henry Crawford; and second, when she queries the legality of
him bringing a slave from his plantation to work at Mansfield Park.
Though both moments are based on incidents in the novel, they are
altered through Frances O’Connor’s performance of a quietly confi-
dent Fanny, who looks her uncle in the eye when she insists she will
not marry Crawford and when she directly asks him about slavery
(in contrast to the novel which reports the asking of the question
but not the question itself in a conversation between Fanny and
Edmund). These changes to Fanny’s character, in as much as they
make her less like the novel’s protagonist and more like Austen, are
the key ways that Rozema creates a conversation about women’s
authorship. The film, though, surrounds the figure of the woman
author with other signifiers of the woman filmmaker’s signature,
signalling her ownership over the film while borrowing the authority
of the novel and the woman novelist.
It’s not a Jane Austen film
Mansfield Park begins with the fetishization of the materials of

writing – paper, ink, quill pens, and handwriting. An emphasis on
the materiality of writing in films about literary authors has been
enough of a trope that at the beginning of his chapter ‘“Miramaxing”:
Beyond Mere Adaptation’ Collins has three close-up images of hands
holding fountain pens in the act of writing and he labels this trip-
tych Miramax Authors Quiz. The choices are Shakespeare, Virginia
Woolf or J.M. Barrie (Collins, 2010: 141). Though Rozema’s film does
not have a close-up of a writing hand like these, the images behind
the opening credits function similarly to revel in the materiality of
writing. The camera is so close-up on the paper, the ink, the hand-
writing, and the quill’s feather that they at first look like landscapes:
the slightly curved paper looks like a sun-drenched desert; the drop
of ink into the well seems like a single raindrop in a dark lake and
sounds like someone diving into the water; the feather of the quill
looks like high grass.16 Only when the handwriting on the paper
comes into focus does it become clear what the camera is admiring.
More importantly, these images revel in the technology of cinema
by using close-up shots, slow motion, lighting and sound to alter the
instruments of writing on screen to appear as if something else all
together, creating a ‘hybridization of the literary and the cinematic’
(Collins, 2010: 152). It is an opening that slyly suggests the director’s
control over the film we are watching.
Unlike the other films above, where the close-up of the hand
writing is diegetic, the camera often pulling back to reveal the full
body of the author, Mansfield Park’s opening fades into the narra-
tive proper with the final credit sequence image of parchment paper
covered in handwriting double exposed with the image of young
Fanny and her sister lying in bed. The music of the opening fades
at the same time as we hear Fanny’s voice, almost a whisper at first,
grow louder, telling her sister a dramatic, gothic story that includes
fainting narrators and starving mothers. Authorship in this film is
first embodied in the figure of the storyteller rather than the writer,
and, similarly to Little Women (Armstrong, 1994), which I discuss
in Chapter 3, the act of storytelling is ‘an act of bonding and resist-
ance that is specifically feminine’ (Vidal, 2005: 272). Fanny’s sister is
her audience for the last story she will tell her in person before she
leaves for Mansfield, and when their mother calls to let them know
the carriage that will take Fanny away has arrived, Susie says, ‘Think
of lots of good stories for me.’ After Fanny arrives in Mansfield, left
alone in the former governess’ room and feeling lonely, her cousin
Edmund gives her paper so that she can write to those whom she
misses. In voiceover, she ‘writes’ to Susie saying that now she had
enough paper ‘for more letters and stories than you shall ever want
to receive’, and throughout the rest of the film, when she writes,
she usually writes stories she creates and stories about the Bertrams,
for her sister, though Edmund becomes a member of her audience
for her stories as well. I will return to Susie and Edmund and their
role as audience for and readers of Fanny’s writing below, but it is
important to see how the film’s opening avoids establishing Fanny’s
authorial identity through the, now clichéd, image of the writer’s
hand, holding the quill, in contact with paper, engaged in the act of
writing. Consequently, there is no co-optation of the metaphorically
phallic pen by the female author (Cartmell, 2013: 158). The image of
the pen belongs to the non-diegetic opening credit images, but the
close-up on the quill’s feather keeps the phallic tip off screen. Fanny’s
introduction to us is as a teller of stories, not a writer. She does write
on paper when at Mansfield, but the film keeps up the image of
Fanny as a storyteller through the moments she directly addresses
the audience. She often has a quill in hand and paper on her desk at
these moments, but we hear what she writes and often watch her tell
us what she writes rather than seeing her do much writing. Rozema’s
use of direct address when Fanny is ‘writing’ makes the strong link
between Fanny’s writing and storytelling to Rozema’s writing and
directing of the film by breaking the conventions of the fourth wall
and reminding us that we are watching a film. The direct look into
the camera is, as I argue above, a key link between the figure of the
author in the text and the woman filmmaker.
Much like Potter, who decided to ‘update’ the novel by bringing
the end to the present and making Orlando’s child a girl, Rozema
‘updates’ Mansfield Park through several changes. It has been widely
recognized that, in addition to Austen’s biography, letters and
juvenilia, Rozema’s Mansfield Park draws on various contemporary
scholarly rereadings of Austen’s novels. These include, most obvi-
ously, Edward Said’s postcolonial analysis of empire as central to
Austen’s novels, and slavery in particular to Mansfield Park, but also
Margaret Kirkham’s feminist revision of Austen’s novels through
the Enlightenment feminism of Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as
Deidre Le Faye’s reading of Austen’s letters to Cassandra in terms
of ‘Austen’s homophilic fascination with women and passionate
homoerotic bond with her sister’ (Aragay, 2003: 182). Whether seen
as a problematic and unfaithful misreading of Austen and her novel
or as a playfully, or even progressively, postmodern rewriting and
revisioning of Austen and her novel, these changes, adaptations,
and intertextualities are, of course, attributed to Rozema as writer
and director of the film. Rozema, has asserted her authority over the
adaptation quite strongly in interviews saying, ‘in the book, Fanny is
interpreted through Jane Austen. In the movie, I’m the interpreter’
(Berardinelli, 1999). Resisting the demands of fidelity criticism
that would have the filmmaker always submit to the final author-
ity of the book unequivocally, she argues that ‘you have to claim
ownership as a director because it’s not a Jane Austen movie, it’s a
Patricia Rozema movie’ (Schwartz, 1999). The latter half of that argu-
ment is a declaration that she has repeated: ‘It’s not a Jane Austen
film … It’s a Patricia Rozema film’ (Kantrowitz, 1999). Though, as
I have argued, the battle for ownership over the adaptation is always
a battle between the authors and the sign of authorship over the text,
it is rare for a filmmaker to articulate that competition in such starkly
binaristic terms via the sign of each authors’ name. Rozema’s expres-
sion clearly negates the terms of fidelity that would give Austen more
authority over the film than herself and does so in the language of
ownership, essentially saying ‘it is mine, not hers’, and some aca-
demic analyses that are critical of the film use these quotes to imply
arrogance on the part of the filmmaker.17 However, through a wider
reading of her interviews, it seems to me that we should read this
opposition differently, taking into account her views on the 1990s
cycle of Austen films, her interest in Austen’s writings beyond the
novel and the author as a historical person, and the recurring themes
in Rozema’s own oeuvre.
When Rozema says ‘it isn’t a Jane Austen film’, she not only
refuses fidelity to the source novel but also fidelity to the expec-
tations of what a ‘Jane Austen film’ should be. The films of the
‘Austen boom’ set these standards, and Rozema tells interviewers
that she is ‘tired of … “polite” Austen interpretations’ and thinks
they ‘make Austen out to be more sentimental than she actually
was’ (Berardinelli, 1999; Kantrowitz, 1999). Near the release of her
film in 1999, she would not criticize specific Austen adaptations, but
in later interviews she did:
Patricia Rozema: At the beginning of my draft I had written, ‘This

ain’t no garden party’ because I dreaded doing another kind of
little genteel nostalgic celebration of politeness. I don’t want to
criticize Sense and Sensibility because it had something good about
it. It’s my favorite one. I didn’t much care for Emma at all.
Interviewer: It was a little too sweet.
Rozema: Like a little. Put some syrup on your candy. That’s what
I lived in dread of. (Herlevi, 2000)
It is often assumed that previous film versions of a novel inevita-

bly have an intertextual relationship with later film adaptations of
that novel, whether it is one of influence or resistance. But in this
instance, Rozema has to resist a whole group of films that obviously

share the conventions of the heritage film genre, but which ‘critics
nonetheless chose to define … as an isolated phenomenon, best
interpreted not within the larger context of recent historical drama-
tizations but in terms of the author, the female author, herself’ and
linking that female author with a female audience who suffered a
‘mania’ for her (Scholz, 2013: 123). The reception, then, situated
the films of the Austen boom as ‘irrational, subjective … personal
and private in nature, unrelated to the public world of business,
law, and politics’ (Scholz, 2013: 123). Rozema’s reading of the novel
that brings to the surface issues that scholars, to much debate, have
seen as latent in Austen’s Mansfield Park – slavery and empire, homo-
eroticism amongst women, Austen’s autobiography – firmly takes the
adaptation out of the personal and private sphere and rereads and
rewrites the narrative as explicitly implicated in those political issues.
In doing so, she purposefully sets the film apart from the ‘Austen
boom’ and makes clear space between that name and her own.
However much she resists being identified with the other Austen
films, Rozema does identify herself with Fanny, making her own
connection to the novel a personal one. She speaks of a connection
between her and Fanny through their gender and class identities:
I connected to her as a woman. I connected to her experience of

starting out life poor and ending up rich (my personal history).
I connected to her rage about not being considered central to
the real social story. I connected to her insecurity around more
educated and elegant individuals. I felt like she was a barely
noticed Canadian at a British function. (Moussa, 2004: 257)
Rozema’s repeated use of the phrase ‘I connect to her’ builds a picture

of Fanny and the filmmaker as kindred spirits, establishing in the
end, not just that Rozema could have been Fanny, but that Fanny
could have been Rozema. She is not the only woman filmmaker of
an adaptation to connect herself to the novel’s character so closely.
Jane Campion, in a documentary about the making of the film The
Portrait of a Lady, said, ‘I am Isabel … I suppose every woman is’,
and in an interview, says that she came to feel as if she knew Isabel
personally, and ‘it was this … that finally gave her “permission to
get in there and be involved with James’s story playfully, and at
the same time very seriously and dangerously”’ (Fraser, 1999: 193).
Both filmmakers, then, use a language of intimacy and affiliation
with the protagonist of their source novels to articulate their author-
ity to adapt them through an experience of identification. Rozema
takes this process a step further by making Fanny even more like
her. Of all of Rozema’s changes, altering Fanny’s character to be a
writer and author through the incorporation of Austen’s juvenilia
and the happy ending of her impending public authorship brings
the film adaptation into the thematic concerns and preoccupations
of Rozema’s previous films in her oeuvre: ‘In almost all of Rozema’s
shorts and features, she presents a meditation on the artist figure
who can be interpreted as metaphorically representing Rozema’s
authorial voice’ (Del Sorbo, 2010: 129). In particular, Rozema’s previ-
ous features I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing (1987) and When Night Is
Falling (1995) feature female artists whose pursuits of self-expression
are distinctly outside patriarchal strictures. Polly, the protagonist of
the former, lives in a naïve inner fantasy world and her photogra-
phy’s unconventionality leaves her outside the mainstream art world
of her co-workers at an art gallery, and the protagonist of the latter,
Petra, is a performer in the subversive ‘Sircus of Sorts’ whose choice
of a lesbian relationship over her former heterosexual relationship
confirms her artistic self-expression.
The significance of Fanny becoming an author is not just that it
is a part of Rozema’s changes to ‘update’ Austen’s work or that, as a
character, she fits into Rozema’s oeuvre. It is that she embodies both
Austen and Rozema as women authors, and that they bring authority
to each other through a process of identification and disidentifica-
tion, creating a double construction of the female authorial subject:
I tried to look at the book, read it as many times as possible, read

as much around it as possible, as in this sort of debate about
its intent and its style and its subtext. And then read as much
about Austen herself as I could. And then write something in
the spirit of, ‘Oh, I get it. Is this what you mean, Jane? Is this – ?
I think I can feel it. This is what I can feel what you’ve done.’ …
It’s a slightly odd situation because everyone, unless they really
know the novel, they’re saying, ‘So now what percentage is you
and what percentage is her?’ And I can’t really answer that.
(Schwartz, 1999)
Austen becomes a character with whom she has a visceral relation-

ship. Like Potter with Woolf, Rozema ‘mind-melds’ with Austen
through research and reading ‘everything’ about her, creating, like
with Fanny the character above, an intimacy that confers authority.
In the end, they become one and the same. Their authorial signa-
tures cannot be separated, and I agree with Laird, who I discussed in
the Introduction, that there is more value in not doing so. Like her
description of Fanny above, in which she constructs Fanny as being
like her rather than the other way around, Rozema imagines Austen
being her in the present day: ‘It is definitely a free and openly inter-
pretive version but I think that if Austen came back as a filmmaker in
1999, she might have adapted her novel into a film in the same way
I did. I believe that’ (Moussa, 2004: 259). Whether critics would agree
with her or not, the point is that Rozema sees the adaptation as a pro-
cess of authorizing herself as a filmmaker in addition to authorizing
Fanny and re-authorizing Austen.
I noted above that Fanny’s sister Susie is the writer’s audience
throughout the film, even when she is not on screen. At the conclu-
sion of the film, after Edmund has finally confessed his love and
proposed to Fanny, Susie appears in Fanny’s previous position, as a
member of the family and companion to the women in it. She tests
her knowledge of history with her cousin Julia, saying ‘Now, Joan of
Arc lived during the reign of … Henry the Sixth’, referencing Fanny’s
first, and longest, direct address/writing sequence in the film, in
which she reads her own ‘The, History of England’ (which is, of
course, 15-year-old Austen’s ‘The History of England’). In that earlier
scene when Fanny has just joined the Mansfield Park household,
she begins, ‘Joan of Arc made such a fuss amongst the English. They
should not have burned her, but they did’, and then she continues as
we see her, but only the back of her, finish a bit of writing; she reads
it aloud as she walks away from the desk. We can see that she has
grown up between cuts, but she still wears her hair long. Then the
film briefly double exposes that Fanny with the fully-grown Fanny
who wears a smock dress and her hair done up. She describes Queen
Elizabeth I as ‘that disgrace to humanity’ for killing Mary, Queen of
Scots, and concludes with a curtsey for her audience, who is now
Edmund. He teasingly tells her that she ‘is awful’, and she replies,
‘all those quarrels and wars; the men good for nothing; and hardly
any women at all … I often think it odd that history should be so
dull; a great deal of it must be invention’. This sequence establishes

Fanny as the embodiment of both Austen and Rozema, by using
both Austen’s writings and what I would argue is Rozema’s view that
official history is dull because the men are all good for nothing and
there are hardly any women at all. The irony in this moment of the
film is clear but the political point remains – history without women
is dull. It is then, no small thing that the end includes Susie learn-
ing about one of the few ‘notable’ women of history, and it evokes
the image of Rozema learning all she can about Austen, a writer she
had never thought she would adapt because she could not see her-
self making a costume drama. By learning about Austen, writing her
into her adaptation as Fanny, whom Rozema also makes an image of
herself, she uses the adaptation process to write herself into a history
of women’s authorship. By showing Susan learning about notable
women of history and, as an inevitable consequence, their general
lack, Rozema suggests that she, and others like her, might too learn
to write herself into history and put on the body of Judith.
Unlike the phallocentric auteur who wields his camera in order
to overcome the author’s mighty pen, Potter and Rozema collabo-
rate with Woolf and Austen to bring forth the figure of the woman
author who represents them both by narrativizing a process of self-
authorization. The relationship between the women filmmakers and
the women authors is not always an easy relationship of feminine
camaraderie. But the women filmmakers’ resistances to and deflec-
tions of the demands of fidelity voice a conversation about what it
means to be a woman author at a time when there are not many oth-
ers. One of the questions raised by that conversation is for the rest
of us: will it take a century for more Judiths of the cinema to emerge
and will those women have less dull histories to draw on, and will
women like Potter and Rozema included?
2
Adapt or Die: The Dangers
of Women’s Authorship
To date, Jane Campion is the only woman to have won the Palme
d’Or at Cannes, and Kathryn Bigelow is the only woman to have
won the Best Director Oscar at the Academy Awards. They are two
of the best known female directors in English-language cinema, and
both have careers that span more than 30 years, a testament to their
survival in an industry that, as I noted in the introduction, makes
little room for women’s authorship. What they have to say about
the status of women in filmmaking is worth taking into account. In
a short piece in the Guardian, Campion declares,
My advice to young female filmmakers is: please do not play the

lady card. Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Just do your work and let
someone else deal with the politics … But we should mandate
that 50% of films produced are made by women. That would be
possible with public money. Instantly the culture would change.
It can be done. (Wiseman, 2013)
And in an interview from 1990 Bigelow shares her view:
If there’s specific resistance to women making movies, I just

choose to ignore that as an obstacle for two reasons: I can’t change
my gender, and I refuse to stop making movies. It’s irrelevant who
or what directed a movie, the important thing is that you either
respond to it or you don’t. There should be more women direct-
ing; I think there’s just not the awareness that it’s really possible.
It is. (Perry, 1990)
49
Campion’s and Bigelow’s comments are characteristic of their

answers to interview questions about gender inequality in the film
industry: on the one hand, they refuse the politicization of gender
for women filmmakers (‘don’t play the lady card’ and ‘I just choose
to ignore that as an obstacle’), and on the other, they recognize
the incessant gender inequality of the film industry (‘mandate 50%
films by women’ and ‘There should be more women directing’).
Their mixed advice on how to deal with the gender inequality of
the film industry necessarily negotiates contemporary postfeminist
culture that continues to claim that women can do whatever they
want even as there has been growing acknowledgement in the
media of the entrenchment of inequality (such as the persistent
lack of equal pay between men and women). In the introduction to
this book, I noted that our current postfeminist era is particularly
fraught for the woman filmmaker whose exceptional status marks
her out as exemplary of feminist success for individual women and
the exception that proves the rule of women’s ‘normal’ choices
made in general (for example, the idea that ‘normal’ women would
choose motherhood over a high-powered career). As such, Campion
and Bigelow are key protagonists in this postfeminist drama: their
longevity as directors with multiple films to their names and their
international recognizability make them ‘exceptionally exceptional’,
highlighting the possibilities of women’s vision and visibility in
filmmaking, while also shining a light on the fact that few women
filmmakers become as successful as they are.
In Chapter 3, I consider two popular adaptations by Jocelyn
Moorhouse and Callie Khouri that at the time seemed to herald
new(ish) careers in directing for two women who had been previ-
ously successful in bringing women’s stories to cinema audiences,
particularly women’s audiences. Both women have directed (to date)
only one follow-up feature film and neither did well at the box office.
They can be compared to male filmmakers who have had similar
early career trajectories, which saw initial success for debut features
and follow-up films, before surviving box-office bombs to achieve
relatively stable and consistent careers. One example is Bryan
Singer: after The Usual Suspects (1993) his third feature film Apt Pupil
(1998) grossed just over half its budget. He directed X-Men (2000)
next, which grossed more than twice its budget. Apt Pupil is based
on a Stephen King novel, making the parallels with Moorhouse’s
Adapt or Die 51
early career even sharper and the lack of further films by her more
poignant.1 On the whole, as Yvonne Tasker argues, ‘women find it
tougher to make films – and, crucially, to make more than one film –
than men. This is the case in the commercial cinema, where a track
record of achievement matters a great deal, and in the seemingly
relentlessly author-led independent sector’ (Tasker, 2010: 217). The
elusive track record for women directors can be derailed at any point,
whether it is that crucial second film or after long breaks between
features or after critical or box-office failures.
While in Chapter 1 I suggested that adaptation can be risky for
a woman filmmaker who adapts a canonical novel because of the
expectations of fidelity, the present chapter considers the risks of
female authorship itself. In the world of filmmaking that remains
male-dominated, each woman filmmaker’s success or failure can
attract, what are sometimes disproportionate amounts of, atten-
tion. The spotlight begins early in a woman’s career and the longer
she lasts, the more dramatic each success or failure seems. Each
adaptation in this chapter has a female protagonist who inhabits
an authorial position and then finds herself in a risky, if not life-
threatening, situation. In the previous chapter, female authorship, as
it is represented on screen and linked to women’s authorship of the
film and the source novel, was presented positively as an identity of
agency for women. By contrast, the films in this chapter textually
foreground the dangers of authorship: The Weight of Water, Morvern
Callar, and In the Cut do this most obviously through their female
protagonists, who, compared to Orlando and Fanny, are more tenu-
ously identified with the agency of authorship and whose practice
of authorship invites risk, including the risk of death. The woman
author’s risk of death in each film is deflected onto the actual death
of a man whose own authorial desires and failures are counterpoints
for the protagonist. All frame the battle between female agency
and authorship and male agency and authorship within the struc-
ture of heterosexual romance. Consequently, love, romance, and
heterosexual union are also constructed as dangers. Each film also
makes a significant change to the end of its respective novel; changes
that I argue reinforce the representation of female agency, by making
what are arguably passive experiences in the novels for each protago-
nist into active experiences in the films, though each film ending
resists easy resolutions.
For the reception discourses of Kathryn Bigelow’s The Weight of

Water, Lynne Ramsey’s Morvern Callar, and Jane Campion’s In the
Cut, fidelity to the novels was not at stake for their adaptations,
largely because they are contemporary texts with which film critics
may or may not be familiar. They do, in significant ways, subvert
the narratives, genres, and styles of each of their respective novels.
They also subvert the expectations of cinematic genres and styles as
well as the authorial narratives of each director built on their previ-
ous films. And yet, I argue, the subversiveness of these adaptations
is much more than the sum of these parts. At the intersection of
industrial contexts, authorial identity, and intertextuality, each film
interrogates the cultural value of authorship that is predicated on its
apparent universality that is implicitly masculine. They destabilize
this universalized, masculinist authorial identity by situating the
figurative woman author in an opposition to it. Her position is unsta-
ble though, constantly at risk, and consequently, her opposition to
the male author is not always direct. Each of the protagonists who
take on this position – Jean, Morvern, and Frannie – simply survive,
which in and of itself challenges the identity of the male authorial
figure in each text who dies. Consequently, her existence itself func-
tions to shift the power relations of the cultural valuing and gender-
ing of authorship. Embodying, within the narrative, the markers of
individual authorship but barred from the universal authority of the
masculine Author, the figurative woman author raises the political
possibilities of being both author and not Author at the same time.
These women authors and the adaptations in which they are found
are irreducibly conjoined – the differences between the films and
their respective novels create the space in which the power balances
shift. Those spaces are also where the woman filmmaker’s authorial
signature is both found and contested. The risky positions of the
women in the texts evoke the authorial identities of the directors,
each of whom made their adaptation of a contemporary novel at a
risky point in their careers.
The Weight of Water
Kathryn Bigelow adapted Anita Shreve’s novel The Weight of Water

five years after directing Strange Days (1995), a film written by Jay
Cocks and Bigelow’s ex-husband James Cameron. Strange Days was a
Adapt or Die 53
commercial failure, making less than a fifth of its budget at the box
office. However it did receive, on the whole, positive reviews from
high-profile critics like Janet Maslin, Roger Ebert, and Peter Travers
who extolled its virtuosity with visual technology that presents a
troubling view of the possibilities of virtual reality and its unflinch-
ing representation of racial politics in Los Angeles only three years
after the 1992 riots. However, some of the reviews could not help
but mention Bigelow’s and Cameron’s marriage, even though they
had divorced in 1991 and, as Will Brooker shows (Brooker, 2003),
many fans of the film attributed its creative and political vision
to Cameron, all of which, as Caetlin Benson-Allot argues, ‘reduces
Bigelow’s influence to the melodrama of the romantic couple’
(Benson-Allot, 2010: 39–40). In light of this tendency in Strange
Days’ reception, it is worth noting, as Manohla Dargis does in her
New York Times review of Bigelow’s career, that her next film, The
Weight of Water, is ‘notably her only movie to touch on matrimo-
nial life’ (Dargis, 2013). Benson-Allot also notes that the film has
received ‘scant notice for its study of female subjectivity’. This is
evidenced by both the film reviews, which generally highlight the
sexual tensions and jealousies between the female characters in the
film, and the nearly complete lack of academic criticism on the film.
One of the only extended pieces of scholarly analysis is Deborah
Jermyn’s ‘Cherchez la femme: The Weight of Water and the Search for
Bigelow in “a Bigelow film”’, and my own argument in this chapter
is influenced by her insightful analysis of Bigelow’s authorship of
the film text and its reception. Jermyn points out that the film was
greeted with disappointment from her fans and the reviewers, and
makes a convincing case that there ‘is a kind of parallel between the
tensions that have permeated the popular and critical construction
of Bigelow’s persona and authorship, and the tensions that have
permeated the reception of The Weight of Water’ ( Jermyn, 2003: 126).
I want to suggest that the tensions in the discursive construction of
Bigelow’s authorship are also reflected in the narrative tensions in
the texts and in the representation of both the female author and
the male author in the film. The textual authors in the film evoke
Benson-Allot’s suggestive point about Bigelow’s authorship of Strange
Days being reduced to romantic melodrama, and the tensions and
relations between them foreground the difficulties and dangers and
risks of female authorship.
Dargis describes, The Weight of Water is a ‘trickily plotted drama

that toggles between two … separate time periods’ (Dargis, 2009).
The protagonist, Jean, played by Catherine McCormack, is a photo-
journalist researching an unsolved nineteenth-century murder for
a newspaper article; Jean is married to Thomas, a celebrated and
Pulitzer-prize-winning poet (though he has published only one book
of poems), played by Sean Penn. Jean is photographing Smuttynose
Island off the coast of Massachusetts, where a mysterious murder
took place in the nineteenth century in which two women were
killed with an axe and a third got free. Thomas’s brother Rich takes
them to the island in his boat, where they are surprised by the pres-
ence of his latest girlfriend, Adaline, played by Elizabeth Hurley.
Jean finds out that couple met at one of Thomas’s readings, where
according to Adaline, she ‘was acting like a groupie and asking too
many questions’. Jean suspects Thomas and Adaline of having an
affair. In the film’s nineteenth-century storyline, the woman who
survives the murder, Maren (played by Sarah Polley), is the narrator
of her transplanted life from Norway to the islands as a fisherman’s
wife. The other two women are her ‘spinster’ sister and her brother’s
wife. As the only witness to their deaths, Maren accuses an itinerant
fisherman who is hanged for the crime. In the island’s records, Jean
finds Maren’s memoir, which includes her testimony and its transla-
tion in which she confesses to the murders, which she committed
out of a jealous rage. Jean’s own jealousy takes her to the island in
the middle of the night, and after Rich brings her back to the boat, a
raging storm descends upon them. While Rich tries to fix the flooded
engine, Jean takes over the wheel. While Adaline is vomiting over
the side of the boat, a sail swings toward her; seeing it, Jean hesitates
before shouting, and Adaline is thrown overboard. Thomas jumps in
to save her. Adaline makes it back to the boat while Thomas struggles
in the water, and Jean jumps overboard after him. Forced under the
waves, she has visions of Maren’s dead sister-in-law and then Maren
herself, whose incessant stare seems to frighten Jean back above the
water. Jean is saved, but Thomas drowns.
As Jermyn notes, the film makes several changes to the novel’s nar-
rative, the most significant of which is the choice to leave Thomas
and Jean’s daughter Billie with her grandmother. In the novel, Billie
is part of the boat trip and acts as a kind of pivot between Jean
and Adaline, who strikes up a friendship with the little girl; Jean’s
Adapt or Die 55
jealousy over Billie’s affection for Adaline creates a parallel triangle

to the one between the two women and Thomas. Adaline has a
daughter whom she has left with her father in California, which
seems to increase Jean’s distrust of her friendship with Billie. This
triangle of affection and jealousy also creates one of the parallels
between Maren and Jean. In both novel and film, Maren cannot have
children and the night of the murders begins with her sister-in-law
Anethe announcing that she is pregnant, which appears to heighten
both Maren’s jealousy of and affection for Anethe. By keeping Jean’s
child out of the plot, the film reduces the parallels between the
women across the two time periods, and strengthens the antagonism
between Jean and Thomas, setting up its conclusion, which is the key
difference between novel and film. In the novel, Billie is left alone
when Adaline goes up on deck to be sick. Adaline goes overboard,
‘and Thomas then goes over’, and it is in the aftermath of their res-
cue (in the novel Thomas survives) that they realize Billie is missing
and has drowned (Shreve, 1998: 217). The film’s climax, briefly out-
lined above, both lessens the stakes by taking the death of a child out
of the narrative and raises it by adding Thomas’ death and putting
Jean’s life at risk as well.
Because Thomas wrote his prize-winning Magdalen Poems as a
catharsis for the death of his high-school sweetheart in a car accident
while he was driving drunk, Jermyn and Sue Thornham see his death
in the film, which is the consequence of saving another woman, as
redemptive, even as it is ‘romantic and self-destructive’ (Thornham,
2012: 183). At the end of the novel, Thomas and Jean are separated;
Rich, Thomas’ brother, takes care of him in the family home, and
through Adaline, Jean finds out that he drinks too much and does
not write. Jermyn argues, rightly, that ‘the film version of Thomas
ultimately amounts to more than the rather woeful image of a “used
up” poet who was once great but now drinks too much: his noble
death recasts this image into a Byronic romantic portrait of a self-
destructive poet as auteur’ (2003: 142). The film suggests, therefore,
that Thomas’ early and heroic death would inevitably cement his
status as an authorial genius. Before his death, that status is unsta-
ble and up for debate: instead of reading his own poetry, he quotes
Dylan Thomas; he tells a young woman who recognizes him that
he is William Burroughs; and his own brother says to him, ‘you’re
talented Thomas, but the world is full of talented assholes’.
Those that sink shall rise again

As many feminist and black scholars have pointed out Barthes’ ‘The
Death of the Author’ came at the time when women and persons of
colour were gaining a degree of authority and subjectivity in literary
studies, both as authors and academics.2 They have also suggested
that giving up one’s subjectivity and authority to the birth of ‘the
Reader’ in theoretical terms is easier to do when one has authority
and subjectivity in actuality. Jermyn suggests that Thomas’ quoting
of other poets and putting on the identity of other great male writers,
however playfully, suggests that ‘the canon of great male writers is
interchangeable’ and may ‘cast doubt on the concept of the auteur’
(2003: 142). However, it also suggests Thomas’ authority and identity
as a great (white and heterosexual) male writer is so presupposed that
to play around with it means nothing to him. To fearlessly and light-
heartedly perform genius means that genius is within reach.3 No
such certainty is available to Jean or Maren. As such, in the film the
authority of women is decided by the men around them; after the
locals demand justice, Maren’s false testimony at the trial is accepted
without question: however, her confession is hidden in a drawer
and dismissed by the male authority of the prosecutor who says to
his clerk, ‘Women are naturally unstable of course; not always to be
believed’. Furthermore, Thomas both invokes and undermines Jean’s
authorial identity when she tells the story of their first meeting to
Adaline: Jean fondly recalls that Thomas said that they were alike in
their work, that they were both ‘trying to stop time’. But Thomas
quickly, and somewhat drunkenly, disavows this declaration, calling
it pretentious shit and just a line ‘to get into her pants’.
However, within the film’s narrative, it is Adaline who first makes
the connection between Thomas and Jean as authors. Earlier in the
film Adaline says to Jean, ‘I guess there’s a certain poetry in photo-
graphy. Don’t ya think? You know, putting a frame around the world.
I think that’s maybe part of the attraction between you two.’ Jean
asks Thomas what he thinks and when he agrees, she dismisses this
interpretation saying that she has ‘always thought of it as animal
attraction. Two strays sniffing each other.’ Of course, Adaline’s con-
tinual flirtatiousness with Thomas is the context for Jean’s answer,
but she quite clearly refuses this parallel that suggests that Thomas’
love for her is based in his own narcissism, that he could love only
someone who can reflect himself back to him. Jean’s indeterminate
Adapt or Die 57
authorial identity embodies women’s tenuous hold on authorship

and authority within postmodernity as much as Thomas’ autho-
rial identity embodies the presumptuousness of the simultaneous
entitlement to and adaptability of genius available to white male
authorship. The distinction between them takes us back to Corrigan’s
author/auteur who is the ‘ideal figure of human agency [and] the
active making of meaning in the midst of our hypertextual culture’.
That ideal figure and therefore the author/auteur is still clearly male.
In the concluding storm scene, then, Thomas’ death is the literal
‘death of the author’, but it is a death that will, as noted above, likely
ensure his longevity as an authorial genius. Jean’s apparent attempt
to save him, replicating his decision to risk his own life to save
Adaline, once again makes her his double. But, as Thornham suggests,
‘Thomas’ straightforward heroism is not available to Jean’ (2012:
185). Because the gendered norms of realist narrative construct Jean
as a heroine rather than a hero, her decision to jump in the stormy
sea seems at first to figure her as a martyr, a romantic self-sacrifice
to eternal love. Pulled under by the waves, Jean seems to accept her
death, sinking slowly with her eyes closed until she reaches out at
some seaweed. The seaweed turns out to be Anethe’s hair and Jean
comes face-to-face with the murdered woman. The moment of recog-
nition initiates Jean’s struggle to surface. As she swims and opens her
mouth to shout, she is then confronted with a billowing nightdress,
which reveals Maren gazing at her with recognition and moving
toward her. Jean’s horror at this visage further spurns her into action,
to swim away from Maren and up toward the surface.
Jean’s visions of the women, whose story she has been trying to
discover and recreate, rouses her to survive:
If Jean, like Campion’s Ada, seems to ‘choose life’ at this point, she
is impelled not by the will to life but by horror: the two women
are doubles not only of each other but of herself … the unruly
woman’s monstrous guilt and rage are revealed to the female
investigator who, recognising her own complicity with these
illegitimate passions, pays with the loss of her lover. (Thornham,
2012: 184–185)
Thornham’s comparison to Campion’s film The Piano is hard to

avoid: both Ada and Jean intentionally throw themselves overboard
from a boat and both appear to be on the verge of drowning as they

float underneath the water, when they suddenly choose to swim
to the surface and, consequently, live. Ada’s destructive desire is
directed only at herself, while Jean’s begins as a destructive impulse
toward Adaline, whom she does not warn that the ship’s sail is about
to knock her over. Of course, this act of violence by omission com-
plicates the narrative when she jumps in the ocean after Thomas,
who has jumped in after Adaline. After they return to the surface,
these protagonists face drastically different conclusions, according
to Thornham: Ada accepts a ‘negotiated compromise’ of equality in
her heterosexual relationship and Jean is left ‘without possibility of
an erotic relationship’ (Thornham, 2012: 180, 185).
Thornham’s reading of The Weight of Water as a response to The
Piano inevitably emphasizes the death of Jean’s husband as the con-
clusion of the film because Jean’s narrative in the present ends with
a flashback of Thomas reciting two lines from Dylan Thomas’s ‘And
Death Shall Have No Dominion’:
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again
Though lovers be lost love shall not
And yet, not unlike The Piano, whose final image is of Ada’s vision
of herself still floating above her piano underneath the sea, The
Weight of Water also ends with an ambiguous attitude toward the
female protagonist’s will to live by returning to the scene of Maren
hiding under the rocks of Smuttynose Island after the murders, say-
ing in the voice over: ‘I prayed for the souls of Karen and Anethe
and Evan … and I also prayed for myself, who did not understand
the visions God had given me.’ As Thornham argues, ‘we do not
know whether the rage which she embodies in the film’s climatic
sequence was ever literally enacted’ (Thornham, 2012: 183). It also,
of course, calls into question Jean’s visions, who has at times seen
Maren’s acts and their consequences in her mind – such as when
she is examining the ruined foundations of the house where the
bodies were found and she has a vision of exactly where the bodies
of Karen and Anethe were found. Their bodies appear as if ghosts,
and Jean gasps in horror at what she has seen.
Both Jermyn and Thornham point out that the film is not only
a ghost story but it references the horror genre as well; after killing
Adapt or Die 59
her sister-in-law with an axe and strangling her own sister to death,
Maren calmly drinks tea in her blood-spattered nightgown with
the bodies at her feet, a vision of the monstrous feminine. Maren’s
appearance to Jean underneath the water brings the photographer
face-to-face with, as Thornham argues, ‘the unruly woman’s mon-
strous guilt’ (2012: 185); it is a guilt she rejects by choosing to surface
and live, but one she cannot escape either (‘she pays with the loss of
her lover’). Jean’s vision of Maren, though, is preceded by her vision
of Anethe at her first attempt to resist drowning by grabbing what
looks like seaweed or even rope but turns out to be the dead woman’s
long hair. Anethe is the opposite of Maren’s unruly monstrousness;
in her beauty and happy disposition she is idealized femininity. She
is the ‘intensely sympathetic … [and] … immensely charming’ Angel
in the House to Maren’s monstrous madwoman. Borrowing from
Virginia Woolf, Sandra Gilbert, and Susan Gubar have shown that
‘women must kill the aesthetic ideal [the angel in the house] through
which they themselves have been “killed” into art. And similarly, all
women writers must kill the angel’s necessary opposite and double,
the “monster” in the house, whose Medusa-like face also kills female
creativity’ (1979: 17). As the women are not just doubles of each other
but, and more importantly, of Jean herself, they incite in her horror,
not just at her guilt and rage but also at her acquiescence and submis-
sion to the demands on her ‘to be tender; flatter; [and to] deceive’ the
male half of the population, specifically the male half of her marriage.
Jean must reject the angel and the monster and the sacrifices they
demand, the martyrdom expected of her, in order to survive.
Women’s storytelling
In the diegesis of the film, Jean’s visions create Maren’s story. Before
she discovers Maren’s memoir-testimony confessing to the crimes,
Jean suggests to her companions that the murderer was a woman
and that the man convicted of the crimes was innocent. In the
novel, the memoir-testimony is half the text. Jean finds it in the
library at the end of Chapter 1. Chapter 2 is her testimony: ‘Maren
Hontvedt’s Document, translated from the Norwegian by Marit
Gullestad’ (Shreve, 39). The full details of Maren’s life are recorded
in roughly every other chapter. In the film, even after Jean acquires
the testimony, it plays little role in communicating Maren’s story.
The story of the murders is given equal screen time to the present
and is at times, narrated with Maren’s voiceover, and it begins long

before Jean finds the testimony. In the novel, the testimony, writ-
ten from her deathbed in Norway, is Maren’s narrative. In the film
Maren gives her testimony to the Prosecutor after the convicted man
has been hanged (how long after is not clear). Though, in the novel,
details from the court proceedings and newspaper reports are told
through Jean’s narrative, the two women’s voices remain separate
textual elements of the novel; while in the film, ‘sound and image
blur and overlap, and voice-overs interweave’ (Thornham, 2012:
182). The novel is self-conscious about storytelling, reporting, writ-
ing, and truth in several ways: the evidence at the trial is clearly
circumstantial and largely based on Maren’s verbal testimony;
Thomas’s poems are based on an actual event, but the prosaicness
of the girl’s real name – Linda – undermines the poems’ sublimity
for Adaline; and both Maren and Jean express the burden of stories.
In the second dated entry of Maren’s testimony, she writes, ‘I have
been thinking this morning upon the subjects of storytelling and
truth, and how it is with the utmost trust that we receive the tales
of those who would give them to us’. And the novel begins with
Jean saying to herself, ‘I have to let this story go. It is with me all
the time now, a terrible weight’ (Shreve, 95 and 3). Still, Maren does
not speak of struggling to understand her God-given visions, as she
does in the film. The narrative of the murders, even as Jean inter-
sperses information from official documents throughout her narra-
tion of trip to Smuttynose with Thomas, Rich, Adaline, and Billie,
does not haunt or disrupt the present in the novel like it does in the
film when Jean sees where the bodies of the dead women were in
the house. Nor does literary Jean jump at these visions as if she saw
ghosts, like she does in the film.
Through these changes and additions, the film has a conversa-
tion with the novel about storytelling and the ambivalent authority
of women’s stories. The novel questions the veracity of historical
records and official accounts. When Jean says ‘No one can know a
story’s precise reality’, she is considering what might have happened
when Nathaniel Hawthorne visited the hotel on Smuttynose Island,
a fact recorded in the history of the island but unembellished with
detail or narrative. The weight and burden of unofficial, personal
stories occupy both Jean and Maren. In the final pages, Jean sees
Maren’s written confession as less an attempt at absolution and more
Adapt or Die 61
an unburdening of ‘a weight she can no longer bear’ (Shreve, 246).

Her burden becomes Jean’s burden. It is Maren’s testimony she has in
her hands at the beginning of the novel when she says she ‘must let
this story go’. A year after the storm and Billie’s death, Jean returns to
the island with Maren’s written confession, and the novel concludes
with Jean dropping it into the water, imagining that ‘before they are
found, the papers will have disintegrated, and the water will have
blurred the ink’ (Shreve, 246). Jean destroys both the evidence of
Maren’s guilt and the story of her life, for as Maren explains, ‘I fear
that the occurrences of which I must speak will be incomprehensible
to anyone who has not understood what went before’, and the bulk
of her written testimony is about her ‘girlhood and womanhood …
and the life of the emigrant to the country of America’ (Shreve, 40).
The film, as I have argued, does not shy away from the ambiva-
lence of women’s authorship and authority, but it does reject the
novel’s insistence on the burden of stories and the feebleness of
storytelling to ease those burdens. The novel begins with Jean’s
desire to ease her pain: ‘Sometimes I think if it were possible to tell
a story often enough to make the hurt ease up, to make the words
slide down my arms and away from me like water, I would tell that
story a thousand times’. And it ends with Jean resigning herself and
Maren to their guilt: ‘I think about the hurt that stories cannot ease,
not with a thousand tellings’ (Shreve, 246). In the novel, Maren’s tes-
timony is written in her own hand, then translated, then transferred
from Norway to Portsmouth, Maine, where it is lost until Jean finds
it. Jean’s own investigation of the murders, her piecing together his-
torical documents, her reading of Maren’s testimony retell Maren’s
story within the novel. But then Jean destroys it in the end, unable
to see anyway out of the rage and guilt. In the film, it is the male
prosecutor who discounts Maren’s testimony and Jean’s brother-in-
law who questions her investigation by suggesting that the right man
might have been hanged. Within the film’s narrative, Jean’s decision
to live, to choose to survive, leaves open the possibility of Maren’s
story being recorded as the truth.
Authorship as domestic melodrama

Though the romantic death of Thomas in the film suggests the
aggrandizement of his authorship, what the film leaves us with is
Jean’s survival and the possible survival of Maren’s testimony, their
existences dependent on each other. Jermyn sums up the multi-

layered authorship of the adaptation:
There are in fact multiple and self-conscious levels of authorship

imbuing the text(s), a layering which demonstrates authorship’s
tenuous nature. One might list these variously as including
Shreve’s novel, Maren’s hand-written testimony, the translation
of that testimony, Jean’s reading of that transcript, Jean’s pho-
tographic rendering of that story, Jean’s own narration, the
adaptation of Shreve’s novel to screenplay, Bigelow’s rendering
of that screenplay to film and our own reading of the novel/film.
(2003: 139)
These intertexts and intratexts multiply the adaptation’s represen-

tation of authorship while the fractured narrative structure of the
film and its rendering of women’s testimonies and investigations
as visions keeps female authorship from easily embodying female
agency as I have argued. And yet, within the layered brokenness of
this film adaptation, there is an insistence that the woman author
lives, that though she could have died with the male author, she
chooses to surface, to survive, to have agency.
When viewing The Weight of Water, it is impossible to ignore that
‘Jean, as creator of images and stories, must to some extent stand in
for the film-maker herself’ (Thornham, 2012: 185). Many saw The
Weight of Water as out of place in Bigelow’s oeuvre and her identity
as an exceptional female director who makes masculine action films –
an identity that is always tenuous, always on the verge of being lost
or compromised with each film that fails critically or financially, or
with films that do not live up to audience expectations, or if there are
too many years between films. The Weight of Water embodies these
conflicts in its doubled identity as an adaptation and in the authorial
figures in the text. As noted above, Bigelow has enjoyed relative lon-
gevity for a woman director in Hollywood. Her continued survival in
a competitive industry is a feat in itself. Jermyn suggests that ‘If, for
a moment, we look at Bigelow’s career itself as a “story”, The Weight
of Water seems not so much a symbolic finale of some sort, then, as
another episode in a particularly beguiling and accomplished serial,
one that promises “to be continued” in characteristically original
and perplexing fashion’ (2003: 143).
Adapt or Die 63
Later well-known episodes in Bigelow’s career seem to fulfil

Jermyn’s view of the ‘to be continued’ nature of Bigelow’s story
and, moreover to evoke The Weight of Water’s authorial domestic
melodrama. When Bigelow won Best Director and Best Film for The
Hurt Locker in 2008 in competition against James Cameron who was
nominated for Avatar in both categories as well, the two were sit-
ting only a row apart at the Academy Awards ceremony. After the
announcement, Cameron pretended to jealously strangle Bigelow
to which she responded with a wide smile and laugh. The self-
conscious reference to their marriage that had ended 17 years before
her win, suggests that they are aware how their careers will forever
be intertwined. Both before and after the ceremony, the newspapers
could not help but write leads about the Oscars in relation to their
marriage: ‘Kathryn Bigelow vs. James Cameron: An Oscar-Themed
Battle of the Exes’; ‘James Cameron Won the Divorce but Kathryn
Bigelow Got the Top Prize’; ‘James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow:
Exes Go From Divorce Contention to Oscar Contention’.4 There were
many more, of course, and there will no doubt be other situations
that invite many more titles that play on her previous marriage as a
key element of her authorship. Though in my introduction to this
book, I argued for the value of collaboration as a space for women’s
authorship, authorial collaboration in marriage has long been an
impediment to the survival of women’s authorship. From this van-
tage point, looking back at Bigelow’s choice to direct a film adapta-
tion of a female-authored novel – to effectively collaborate with
another woman – five years after Strange Days and more than ten
after the divorce, now seems less an awkward detour and more like
the expression of her will to survive.
Morvern Callar
Alan Warner’s novel Morvern Callar is told in first person by Morvern

herself. Her narration does not tell us ‘how we should feel about
[her actions]’ but it lets us into her head through the recounting
of the music she listens to on her Walkman (Caughie, 2007: 108).
Lynne Ramsay’s cinematic Morvern hardly speaks throughout the
entire film. The film’s distancing of Morvern from the audience is
reinforced by Samantha Morton’s performance which relies on her
not empty, but blank and yet wide-eyed stare. Between these two
different texts most of the narrative events stay the same. What
is most suggestive about this adaptation for me is that Ramsay’s
exclusion of Warner’s narrative voice is an inversion of Warner’s
appropriation of a woman’s voice. In both the novel and the film,
Morvern appropriates her boyfriend’s novel and, consequently, his
authorial identity. It is Ramsay’s film, however, that through its pro-
cess of adaptation and authorship directly reflects Morvern’s usur-
pation of that ‘ideal figure’ of the male author. As such, Ramsay’s
film pulls off a kind of trick, and it is this trick of appropriating male
authorship and re-authorizing it through the figure of the woman
author that I consider below.
In the film, Morvern wakes on Christmas morning to find her
boyfriend lying on the floor of their flat; he has killed himself.
He was a writer, working on a novel. Morvern works in a grocery
store. She opens his presents, a leather jacket and a compilation
tape, and a computer disk with his novel on it. On the screen of
the computer, where he presumably spent much of his time, is a
message for Morvern: ‘READ ME’. It reads, ‘Be brave, I love you’,
and after a perfunctory, ‘it was just something I had to do’ expla-
nation, he tells her to print the novel he finished and to send it to
the address of a publisher written on the screen below. The message
says that he wrote the novel for her. She takes this message quite
literally. With a few, slow key strokes she changes his name on the
title page to her own. Then she follows his instructions, prints it
and sends it off.
Morvern simply tells her friends that He has gone; throughout,
like in the novel, he is referred to as ‘Him’, but we know from the
novel’s title page that his name was James Gillespie. After a day or
two with his body on the floor she cuts it up with a kitchen knife
and buries him in the woodlands with a trowel. She takes the money
out of her boyfriend’s bank account and takes her best friend Lanna
on a holiday in Spain. After some partying at a packaged resort,
Morvern drags Lanna into the local areas, where they get caught up
in a village festival. They trudge through the desert that night, not
knowing exactly where they are, and with her friend complaining
about wanting to return to the resort, Morvern leaves her sleeping
on the side of the road. The publishers catch up with Morvern at
another resort, and tell her that the female voice of the novel was the
most authentic they had ever read. They offer her £100,000 for the
Adapt or Die 65
rights to the novel, and ask her what she’s working on next, which
Morvern answers only with a grin. The film ends with Morvern in
a club dancing alongside other revellers, while listening to the tape
James gave her, which is playing the song ‘Dedicated to the One I
Love’ by The Mamas and the Papas.
The film received wide critical acclaim from the New York Times
and the Los Angeles Times to the Village Voice and Rolling Stone to
the Guardian and Sight and Sound. Many saw it as a confirmation of
Lynne Ramsey’s auteurism that had been established with her first
feature, the critically acclaimed Ratcatcher (1999). Set during the
1973 Glasgow Binmen Strike, Ratcatcher follows 12-year-old James,
‘a loner morbidly drawn to the canal where his friend … accidentally
drowns at the beginning of the film’, an event for which James feels
responsible.5 Though the film includes a whimsical scene in which
a mouse tied to a balloon floats to the moon (which is inhabited
by a whole colony of mice frolicking together) it is often associated
with British social realist films and the contemporary version of
that trend in the films of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach. In the same
kinds of ways as Ramsay’s debut, Morvern Callar also draws on the
British tradition of realism ‘while conjur[ing] up an array of sur-
real techniques’ (Williams, 2002). One scene regularly mentioned
as an example of this is when she cuts up her boyfriend’s body in
the bath while listening to ‘I’m Sticking with You’ by The Velvet
Underground, which moves from being non-diegetic soundtrack
to diegetic music coming from the Walkman Morvern wears. The
fairground ride-like tune and the ironically romantic lyrics are a
disconcerting accompaniment to Morvern’s dismemberment of His
body, which she carries out wearing only bright pink underpants,
the Walkman, and sunglasses. His body is kept from the audience’s
gaze, with the scene playing out in close-ups on Morvern’s body as
blood splatters across her. And then the camera is positioned from
outside the bathroom door, where we see her from the neck down
only, one leg up against the tub for leverage. What keeps the image
of Morvern disarticulating His’ body from being grotesque is the
impassivity of Samantha Morton’s face. Her sunglasses to block the
blood spray, her headphones to block the sound of cutting flesh,
and her half-nakedness to avoid bloodied clothing make her actions
seem practical and expedient. Critics find it difficult to talk about
the film, using words like ‘magic’, ‘mystery’, ‘ghosts’, and ‘dream’
to describe its tone, the characters, and its (non-existent) plot.6

Scholarly analysis of the film tends to focus on its Scottishness and
its relationship with Scotland’s changing national and political
identity in a post-devolution context. Others focus on the film’s
tactility (Morvern touches dirt, worms, and rotting vegetables, all
filmed in close up) and Morvern’s gaze as ways of understanding a
character who hardly speaks. The film’s spare dialogue, bare plot,
and mix of realist and surrealist modes makes it open to many
productive readings.
There is, though, a tendency in both the reviews and the academic
criticism to read the film as a painting of Morvern’s grief and love
for James. For the reviewers, ‘His suicide sets Morvern off on a jour-
ney fuelled by survivor’s guilt’, making the film ‘in essence … a story
of love and bereavement; the study of a relationship that continues
its trajectory after one party has gone’ (Brooks, 2002; Mitchell,
2002). And her decision to replace his name with her name on the
novel is ‘a way for her to absorb his identity into her own, to take
a piece of him with her once and for all’ (Zacharek, 2002). As Lucy
Bolton suggests, ‘Morvern Callar offers a representation of a young
woman which is unusual and challenging … having seemingly
turned a blind eye to the body of her dead boyfriend’; consequently,
it is not difficult to see why the dominant reading would be one
which attempts to read Morvern’s blankness and her actions into
an expression of a feeling that fits the cultural norms of femininity
(Bolton, 2010: 190). In her article, ‘Perverse Angle: Feminist Film,
Queer Film, Shame’, Liza Johnson argues that Morvern Callar is a film
in which ‘negative affect … [is] a queer way of narrating women’s
desires’, and her approach is highly productive for thinking through
the ways Morvern constantly looks close up at the world around her,
but Johnson’s analysis, much like the reviews, depends on reading
all of Morvern’s actions and choices as a response to her boyfriend’s
suicide:
The camera simulates the close, familiar gaze that he can no

longer offer in return. Morvern is cut loose, destabilized, and
traumatized by the sudden removal of her structuring partnership,
and the film is fundamentally structured, narratively and visually,
around the crisis presented by the removal of his returned look,
the loss of his engagement’. ( Johnson, 2004: 1362–1363)
Adapt or Die 67
Similarly, Bolton suggests that ‘It seems apt to describe Morvern’s

secret deceit as lodging her memory of her boyfriend in the nest
of her mind, and her body as a cradle in which she preserves her
memory of touching him’ (2010: 195). Though I agree with both
Bolton’s and Johnson’s desire to read the film as disruptive of femi-
nine norms, by seeing her actions as, ultimately, representations of
her grieving process, it keeps the film tied to the personal rather than
the political. I do not invoke that famous feminist phrasing lightly,
and I do think their analyses add to our understanding of ‘feminine’
forms of knowing and experiencing the world, such as feelings and
touching, as valid forms of knowledge and experience. However,
I think that the film, read as an adaptation and through the cultural
valuing of authorial identity, also takes on the political as personal. If
The Weight of Water is an adaptation about the woman author choos-
ing to live, and to survive against the threat of her extinction in the
midst of the death of the male author, then Morvern Callar is a film
about the continuing survival of the woman author and the tricks
and deceits she employs to remain so.
Authorship as survival
It may be that, as Geoff Andrew suggests, ‘the lack of any evidence
that Morvern feels guilty about how she responds to her boyfriend’s
death is perplexing and incredible’. However, Ramsey herself has
suggested that Morvern’s actions and decisions are ways of surviving:
[Her] boyfriend commits quite a selfish act as the tortured artist

looking for posthumous fame, and she takes complete survival
from that. You can question her morality if you want, but what
he does is only a romantic notion whereas what she does is more
about survival. (Andrew, 2002)
James, then, like Thomas in The Weight of Water, can rely on the cer-
tainty that death will not be the end of his authorial identity. And
like Thomas, his authorial identity is linked to the genius of literary
tradition when Morvern’s foster father asks, ‘What have you done
with Dostoyevsky tonight?’ The suicide seems a direct attempt to
evoke the likes of the Romantic poets Keats and Byron, whose tragic
early deaths cannot be separated from their authorial fame and iden-
tity, and a belief in the romantic notion that for artists ‘it’s better to
burn out than fade away’. In the novel, his note to Morvern is five
paragraphs long, talks about his longing for peace and admonishes
his much younger girlfriend: ‘Keep your conscience immaculate and
live the life people like me have denied you. You are better than us.’
But he remains full of himself, saying, ‘I’ll settle for posthumous
fame as long as I’m not lost in silence … I don’t want to leave this life
which I love so much. I love this world so much I have to hold onto
this chair with both hands. Now send off this novel and have no
remorse. Be brave’ (Warner, 1996: 82). In contrast, he is much more
brief in the film, saying succinctly, ‘Don’t try to understand, it just
felt like the right thing to do.’ He then tells her how to get the book
published and that he loves her, and to ‘Be brave’, concluding by
telling her there is money in his account for the funeral and that she
should keep the music for herself. Either anxious about missing out
on life but more concerned with his posthumous fame, or so lost in
his own thoughts that ending his life is right but unexplainable, this
is not someone who is killing himself out of depression or despair. It
is simply the thing he must do to become an ‘Author’. He is fulfilling
Michel Foucault’s claim that ‘if we wish to know the writer in our
day, it will be through the singularity of his absence and in his link to
death, which has transformed him into a victim of his own writing’
(2010: 1477). There is nothing to gain for Morvern in giving up her
Self. In response to the postmodern loss of the subject and death of
the author, Nancy Miller has argued that they
prematurely foreclose the question of identity for [women] …

Because women have not had the same historical relation of iden-
tity to origin, institution, production, that men have had, women
have not, I think, (collectively) felt burdened by too much Self,
Ego, Cogito etc … her relation to integrity and textuality, desire
and authority, is structurally different. (1985: 106)
Again, like Thomas in The Weight of Water, the male author’s pre-
sumed access to genius leads him to make the one choice he knows
will ensure it.
Of course, Foucault above, is not talking about the actual death of
individuals, but he is discussing the ‘kinship between writing and
death’ and how ‘we find the link between writing and death mani-
fested in the total effacement of the individual characteristics of the
Adapt or Die 69
writer’ (Foucault, 2010: 1477). He gives two examples of this kinship

between death and writing. The first is the narrative redemption of
death of the hero in the Greek epic. The second is The Arabian Nights,
which ‘had as its motivation … the strategy of defeating death …
Scheherazade’s story is a desperate inversion of murder; it is the
effort throughout all those nights, to exclude death from the circle
of existence’ (2010: 1477). It is, I would argue, no small thing that
the one reference to a woman in Foucault’s essay is to Scheherazade.
And that the reference is in the context of writing as the effort to
exist and to ward off the threat of death is all the more suggestive
for my reading of all the films in this chapter. Morvern (and Jean and
Frannie), like Scheherazade, is a woman who survives, and ‘in the
mythic Scheherazade’s situation, [we] enter the terrain of the female
trickster’ (Landay, 1988: 1). As Ramsey says in the interview quoted
above, Morvern’s choices not to tell anyone that her boyfriend has
killed himself, not to hold his funeral with the money he left, and to
put her name on her boyfriend’s novel and send it to get published as
her own, are acts of survival and, as Ramsey would have it not, ‘only
[the] romantic notion’ of a selfish man (emphasis mine).
Thornham argues that by putting her name to the novel, Morvern
takes up the place of hero that would have been His natural place: ‘It
is the [purloined novel’s] power to confer authorship that is impor-
tant; in claiming that, Morvern claims the status of subject and also
of hero’ (Thornham, 2012: 110). Indeed she does, but Morvern’s sta-
tus as hero – successful subject of the narrative – depends on tricking
the publishers into believing that the novel is hers. Her ability to do
so means she defies the normal process of authorial signification:
‘the author-function … is not formed spontaneously through the
simple attribution of a discourse to an individual’ (Foucault, 2010:
1483). In contradiction of Foucault, Morvern’s authorial idenity is
‘formed spontaneously through the simple attribution of a discourse
to an individual’, and by accomplishing this she performs a ‘process
of ironic resignification which marks Trickster territory’ (Tannen,
2007: loc 4075). Seeing Morvern as a Trickster does not deny her grief
but moves beyond the idea that her every move adds up to a kind of
reverse chivalry of keeping Him alive in her mind. She could have
sent the novel off in his name, held the funeral, and become the
pitiable victim of suicide. Instead, Morvern’s con allows her ‘to move
psychologically beyond identification as a victim to identification as
[her] own unique self, utilizing [her] wit as the process which trans-
forms pathos into pleasure’ making her, in Ricki Tannen’s formula-
tion, a ‘postmodern Trickster’ (Tannen, 2007: loc 4115).
Morvern’s trickster status is further corroborated by her refusal of
a stable and inherited identity. Robert Morace shows how this differs
in the film from the novel:
[Morvern’s] unusual name links her to the language, land, and

history of both Scotland and Spain. Morvern is a peninsula a little
north of Oban, and ‘callar’ (‘to be silent’ in Spanish and ‘fresh’ in
Scots) connects her through her foster father to the shipwrecked
Spanish sailors who swam ashore and married local women cen-
turies earlier, as Lanna’s grandmother, Couris Jean, explains to
her. In the film, Morvern is rootless and without family, the one
barely audible mention of her foster-mother aside … Instead of
endowing her with a name rich in cultural associations (however
contingent, rather than essentialist, one of those associations may
be), Ramsay outfits the unmoored Morvern with a found object,
a necklace bearing the name Jackie that she will briefly take as
her own but that connects her with nothing and with no one.
(Morace, 2012: 121)
Traditional Trickster figures are shape-shifters. In the film, Morvern’s

Jackie necklace, which she wears to the pubs and clubs with Lanna
and then later presents as her actual name to a Spanish family who
give her a lift, comes from nowhere. The first time we notice it is on
her night out with Lanna before she puts her name on His novel and
buries Him. Lanna asks, ‘What’s that? Who’s Jackie?’ Morvern simply
says, ‘I found it.’ And Lanna replies with a smile, ‘Lucky Bitch, it’s
gold.’ Separated from the original owner, the name has no meaning,
as Morace argues, for Morvern, but it does have value for her, and
not just its worth in gold. Its value for her is the practice of accepting
found objects that have been separated from their origins and mak-
ing them her own. James might have seen death as the most expedient
route to becoming Author, but authorship and ownership are inextri-
cable and he gives Morvern the opportunity to take over ownership.
The implicit parallels between Morven’s actions and the resignifying
process of film adaptation are clear, as are the parallels with Thomas’
playfulness with authorial identity in The Weight of Water, but the
Adapt or Die 71
point here is that putting on the necklace and putting her name on
the novel are subversions of social and moral norms that enable her to
change her life, to put on a new identity of her own making.
This new identity may be more accurately thought of as identi-
ties because Morvern as Jackie, Morvern, the author, and Morvern,
Lanna’s friend, exist at the same time, while at the same time
Morvern also takes on the name Olga, while Lanna takes Helga when
chatting to men at the resort. The traditional shape-shifting Trickster
is able to switch between human and animal and, more often,
between genders; but, importantly, as both Tannen and Landay
point out, traditionally the Trickster is implicitly masculine and
assumes the autonomy and mobility that comes with that gender
identity. Though we might argue that Western women at the turn of
the millennium are no longer completely excluded from acquiring
autonomy and mobility, it is still rare to see artistic/fictional rep-
resentations of women who have such independence and freedom
of movement (as such, Morvern echoes a realist version of Orlando
who travels across so much space and time). So, instead of seeing her
extended travels through Spain in the film as ‘escape’, which Morace
implicitly compares negatively to the novel’s suggestion of the
‘powerful and primitive attraction Morvern feels to her roots in two
cultures’, we might see her movements from Oban to the Spanish
resort to the village with the bull-run to the desert full of ‘donkeys
and cactus’, according to Lanna, as Morvern becoming what Ramsey
calls a ‘female wanderer’ (Andrew, 2002). Ramsey also says she ‘liked
that idea’ because ‘you don’t get many female characters like that’
(Andrew, 2002). After having left the resort and been caught in a
village bull-run, Morvern and Lanna fall out as they trudge through
the remote Spanish desert looking for a hotel. They fall asleep on the
side of the road in the dark, and in the morning, as I noted above,
Morvern leaves Lanna, still sleeping, at the side of the road, leaving
a stash of money that she secures with a rock near Lanna’s head.
She walks away down the dirt road, which disappears into the base
of the mountains behind her, thick cactus as tall as she is on either
side. Wearing her aviator sunglasses, faded blue jeans, brown boots,
and gently swinging her denim jacket, she evokes the image of a lone
cowboy, though feminized and postmodernized with her long hair,
pink tank top, and Walkman instead of a gun at her hip, the syn-
thesizer sounds of Can’s ‘Spoon’ playing. It is a moment emblematic
of the ways that the film subverts the foundational definition of Art
Cinema and its exploration of the ‘thematic of la condition humaine’.7
The core narrative elements of Bordwell’s definition – a goal-less
protagonist burdened by ordinary, everyday life made a heroic figure
by a master of Art cinema – inevitably masculinizes both the content
and the creation of an Art film, by structuring itself via the binary
of everyday life versus heroism (Bordwell, 1999: 718–719). The eve-
ryday, and the ordinary, are inevitably associated with domesticity
and therefore femininity and women. As an essentially goal-less pro-
tagonist, burdened by ordinary, everyday life, Morvern takes on the
role of art cinema’s masculine hero of alienation, but as Johnson and
Bolton’s articles suggest, this makes her an ‘unusual and challenging’
female figure (2010: 190).
Morvern is also an unusual and challenging character and narrator
in the novel. In her head, it gives us perspective in her own idiolect:
‘He’d cut His throat with the knife. He’d near chopped off His Hand
with the meat cleaver. He couldn’t object so I lit a Silk Cut. A sort
of wave of something was going across me. There was fright but I’d
daydreamed how I’d be’ (Warner, 1996: 1). Narratively, the differ-
ences between her literary existence and her cinematic existence cul-
minate in the differing endings. Alan Warner’s Morvern gets a total
of £2,500 for the novel from the publishers, which she spends at the
resort with Lanna. She funds her further three years abroad with His
inheritance from his father: £44, 771.79. She leaves a note for Lanna
on His computer screen: ‘Away raving. Dont be worrying about me.
Sell everything here (sic).’ Three years later the money runs out and
she returns home to Scotland, passing Oban, her home with Him,
and heading for the Hebrides, where her foster-mother is buried.
Hitching on the road, she gets caught in a heavy snowstorm and
then finds shelter in an abandoned church. After a bout of uncon-
trollable shivering and then throwing up on the floor, Morvern feels
better and sits up as the early morning Scottish Winter sunrise wak-
ens the village below. Her final words are,
I placed both hands on my tummy at the life there, the life grow-
ing right in there. The child of the raves.
I put my head down and closed my mouth. I started the walking

forwards into that night.
Adapt or Die 73
In the film, Morvern receives £100,000.00 for the novel, and she
returns to Scotland only briefly to pick up the cheque and see if
Lanna wants to go back to Spain or anywhere else with her. When
Lanna tells her ‘I like it here. Everyone I know is here. It’s the same
crap everywhere Morvern. Stop dreamin’, Morvern takes a slug of
whisky, says she has to use the toilet and leaves without saying
goodbye. Williams and Thornham suggest that Ramsay makes a fair-
tytale out of the novel, but we might also see it as a fantasy, a kind
of wish-fulfilment narrative. The Trickster gets away with it, and she
is free to do what she wants, go where she wants. She ‘behave[s] as
shadow figure … who break[s] the rules and call[s] attention to pos-
sibilities outside gender roles and ideals’ (Landay, 1998: 2). The film
makes this rewriting of Morvern possible by not reinserting her in
the symbolic order by returning ‘home’ to her foster-mother’s village
with a baby on the way. Or to let Ramsey say it more directly her-
self: ‘so, there’s this “child of the raves,” which I thought was really
naff. It suggested you grew up by getting pregnant’ (Andrew, 2002).
Ramsay’s Morvern, then, as a metaphor for the woman author,
takes the risk that she might be found out as a ‘fraud’ and instead
appropriates the agency of the ‘ideal figure’ of the author for herself
(Thornham, 2012: 108).
Like Thornham, I think a key way to read the film is through
authorship and to see Morvern’s appropriation of James’ novel as
‘an undoing, moreover, that mirrors that which operates in the film
itself, since Morvern Callar is itself a “rereading” of a male-authored
novel … which speaks through the voice of its female narrator’
(2012: 108). Women authors, and as I am suggesting throughout this
book, particularly women filmmakers who are a statistical minority,
are always at risk of being declared ‘frauds’, in large part because they
necessarily appropriate the implicit masculinity of authority when
they take on authorship. Because taking on the authorial-function
for women requires this gender switching, their hold onto the iden-
tity of author/auteur is always tenuous and at risk. In an endnote,
Thornham quotes Ramsay as saying, ‘It’s funny … I’m always think-
ing I’m never going to get to make another film. Still fully expect to
be back down the jobcentre’ and then remarks that Ramsay did not
make another film until 2011 after she lost the rights to Alice Sebold’s
The Lovely Bones to Peter Jackson, who the producers thought would
more likely capitalize on the novel’s best-selling sales (Thornham,
2012: 203). At the beginning of this chapter, I suggested that women

filmmakers struggle to maintain directing careers and that the ‘money
men’ do not often trust women to make them money. Though in
Chapter 1, I suggest that the end of Potter’s Orlando can be read as
breathing life into Judith Shakespeare for cinema, invoking all those
women of the twentieth century and the films they did not make,
could not make, we must continue to point out that the threats to
and elision of women’s film authorship remain.
In the Cut and the scene of the crime

Much like Sue Thornham’s argument, in her article ‘Starting to Feel
Like a Chick: Re-visioning Romance in In the Cut’, Kathleen McHugh,
in her book on Jane Campion, argues that the film is about how
‘romance and sexuality are [still] dangerous for women … [that]
their desires and choices are insistently compromised by roman-
tic myths whose fatality for women pointedly mirrors that of the
thriller’ (2007: 103). In In the Cut, Frannie, played by Meg Ryan, is
an English teacher in New York City who calls herself a writer and
teaches Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. The romantic myth that
pervades throughout the film is embodied in the story of her parents
meeting that she tells her half-sister Pauline: engaged to someone
else, their father fell in love with Frannie’s mother and left the other
woman for her. That this story is a fantasy is portrayed by the silent-
film like sequences of her parents meeting while ice-skating, the
romance encapsulated by her father kneeling on the ice to give her
mother a ring. That the story is dangerous is represented by Frannie’s
dream that on the ice-rink her father skates over her mother’s legs
and slices them in half. Romance, in Frannie’s mind, ends in death.
Thornham’s point above is that the myth of romance, so regularly
understood as a feminine narrative and associated with women read-
ers and writers, is a patriarchal threat to women, especially when
women seek to author their own stories. In the film, the serial killer
who leaves engagement rings on his female victims represents this
narrative threat. He puts the most recognizable symbol of romantic
love on the hands of women whose bodies he has cut into pieces. In
the novel, the killer cuts off his victims’ nipple as his ‘souvenir’ of
the killing for himself, while in the film the killer’s engagement ring
‘signature’ is for those who find the body and is his way of symboli-
cally asserting his authority and ownership (i.e. his authorship) over
Adapt or Die 75
women. Frannie’s survival in the end represents the survival of the

woman author against the patriarchal narratives that are threatened
by her desire for agency and self-authorization. I want to end this
chapter with some brief thoughts on how In the Cut suggests the
necessity of the death of the male author for the woman author to
survive.
Frannie collects words from street slang, which she describes as
usually sexual, violent, or both, and from the poems, usually by men,
which are part of a poetry in transit scheme on the subway. Her word
collecting takes her around the threatening city New York, where in
addition to the threat of the serial killer and an aggressive student,
an ex-boyfriend stalks her. Frannie may call herself a writer, but she
is an author who only scribbles down words and their definitions,
and writes fragments of poetry and phrases that she tacks up on her
walls. She mostly collects rather than writes, and sometimes is visibly
affected by the poetry in the advertising sections on the walls of the
subway trains she rides. Reading them to herself, Frannie sways as
the focus of the camera blurs everything around her. Words, defini-
tions, and poetry all seem to have more power over her than she does
over them. She is also a teacher whose students tell her that To the
Lighthouse is just a boring book about an old lady who dies. When
she asks them how many ladies have to die to make it interesting,
one tells her ‘at least three’. She meets a student at a bar, and on the
way to the toilet, she sees a woman perform fellatio on a man with
a tattoo on his wrist. Later, she realizes that she was witness to a
murder when the woman turns up dead. Frannie gets involved with
the detective on the case, Malloy, who tells her, ‘I can be whatever
you want me to be’.
In Susanna Moore’s novel, Frannie teaches creative writing to
gifted but underprivileged students, and she is more clearly marked
as an author and a scholar of language. She ‘keep[s] a dictionary in
preparation for a paper on New York street slang’ and her friend John
tells her that he spoke to an old boyfriend from her time at NYU and
her ex told him that ‘you really haven’t written anything up to your
own high standards since your article on the way Valley girls talk’
(Moore, 2003: 54, 138). Even as that last line shows how the men of
the novel undermine Frannie’s authorship, the film’s less definitive
representation of her authorial identity makes her word, phrasing,
and meaning scavenging function as a defence against the men in
her life who threaten her with their desire to make her the romantic
heroine of their own stories. Like Jean in The Weight of Water who
pieces together another woman’s story, Frannie seems to be piece
together the language of masculine romantic and sexualized threats
with her collecting of words that are largely slang for women’s body
parts and the act of sex – ‘in the cut’ refers to the ‘cut’ between a
woman’s legs. Again like Jean, she is a kind of detective, helping
Malloy with his investigation but also trying to figure out who she
is when men around her seem to know what they want her to be.
John, in the film, is not just a needy friend, but he is an ex-boyfriend
who is obsessed with her, following her, gazing at her through coffee
shop windows, and appearing in her bed, half-dressed, uninvited,
when she gets home. Played neurotically by Kevin Bacon, he leaves
a message on her answering machine about how much the two times
they had sex mean to him, more than they mean to her, making him
sound like a stereotypical jilted woman figure. The message plays
while Malloy is in her apartment, and the simultaneous ‘presence’
of two men who want her, but who express it in such different ways
suggests the various forms the romantic myth can take. John, of
course, functions like her student Cornelius (who is writing about
the serial killer John Wayne Gacy) does: to embody in her everyday
life the more vague threat of the serial killer who leaves engagement
rings and could be anywhere at any time. Frannie’s word collecting
and subway poetry reading are moments when she turns away from
the patriarchal gaze embodied by these characters. She puts her head
down to make a note, or faces a wall to post a definition, or looks up
at the subway wall to read poetry.
One night Frannie is mugged. Not long after, she finds her half-
sister dead (the film now has two ‘dead ladies’). Malloy finds an
engagement ring, which is the signature of the serial killer. At times
she is suspicious of Malloy since she believes that he was the man
she saw getting the blowjob: a suspicion based on her recognition of
the tattoo on his wrist. When he comes to her place to check on her
after her sister’s murder, she is drunk and handcuffs him to the water
pipes. They have sex while he is still handcuffed to the pipe. After,
she finds a charm lost from her bracelet the night she was mugged
and leaves the apartment, thinking Malloy is guilty. Outside she runs
into his partner, who comforts her and takes her to the lighthouse
on the river where he fishes; he grabs her, slips a ring on her finger
Adapt or Die 77
and then tries to slit her throat. His movements expose his wrist and
she sees the tattoo that means that he is the murderer. Frannie shoots
him with Malloy’s gun, which was in his jacket pocket she is wear-
ing. She returns to her apartment and lies down on the floor next to
Malloy who is still handcuffed to the pipe. In the novel, Rodriguez,
Malloy’s partner, and the person revealed as the serial killer, wounds
Frannie at the lighthouse, cutting her throat, cutting off her nipple
(his ‘souvenir’) and letting her bleed. When she tries to escape, he
cuts her more, leaving her there ‘for a few days’. She thinks to herself,
‘There is an essay on the language of dying. The dying sometimes
speak of themselves in the third person. I was not speaking that way.
I said: I am bleeding. I am going to bleed to death’ (Moore, 2003:
179). In the first-person narration of the novel, Frannie narrates
her own death. The structure and form of the novel allow her to
authorize herself even as she dies. Campion’s change to the end, in
which Frannie survives and kills the killer (resisting the demand for
three ‘dead ladies’), is why Thornham suggests provocatively that,
‘by insisting on the difficulties of female authorship, Campion’s film
[In the Cut] also declares its possibility’ (2007: 132). If the difficul-
ties of female authorship are represented by Frannie’s fragmented
collecting of language in a city with the threat of her own death
constantly around her, then its possibilities are represented by the
death of the male serial killer who represents the patriarchal author
of those threats.
In her final chapter of the The Acoustic Mirror, titled ‘The Female
Authorial Voice’, Kaja Silverman begins her search for the female
authorial voice by ‘return[ing] to the scene of the Barthesian crime,
and to search there both for the murder weapon and for the corpse of
the deceased author’ (Silverman, 2003: 51). Silverman’s investigation
of ‘The Death of the Author’ is an elegant theoretical interrogation of
Barthes. I simply want to borrow her image of the female critic, and
by implication the female author, as detective. Frannie’s own investi-
gation causes her to believe the wrong man is the killer and when she
runs from him into the arms of the actual killer, she must kill him
to survive. In the previous chapter, I made the claim that women
authors can authorize themselves through their collaboration with
other women authors. In this chapter, I have suggested, through The
Weight of Water, that collaboration with the male author is a threat
to female authorship, and I have suggested, through Morvern Callar,
that taking on the masculine authorial-function risks the woman

author exposed as a fraud. In Campion’s In the Cut, Frannie nearly
ends up as the corpse at the scene of the crime, but she kills the killer
instead. She survives. Taken together, all three films symbolize the
threat to female authorship by the continued dominance of the ideal
figure of the masculine author. As Miller says ‘[the woman author’s]
relation to integrity and textuality, desire and authority, is structur-
ally different’ than the male author’s. While the male author plays
around with his identity, putting on others or taking it off altogether,
his authority remains. The woman author must still fight to self-
authorize, to claim her identity, to tell her story. She must navigate
the patriarchal impulse to construct her as martyr, fraud, or victim.
In the changes to the novel’s endings, each of these film adaptations
represent the woman author’s will to survive.
3
Authorizing the Mother:
Sisterhoods in America
‘Sisterhood’, of course, has long been an important term for femi-

nism, and from the beginning it was meant to be inclusive, reach-
ing across racial, sexual, cultural, and national boundaries between
women, despite feminism’s tendencies toward privileging white,
middle class women.1 It has been criticized for being ‘an emotional
appeal masking the opportunism of manipulative bourgeois white
women. It was seen as a cover-up hiding the fact that many women
exploit and oppress other women’ (hooks, 1984: 44). Contemporary
postfeminist media culture has co-opted ‘sisterhood’ in ways that
both evoke its originally intended meaning and undermine it. On
the one hand, Hannah Sanders suggests that representations of sister-
hood can ‘deny … the postfeminist ethic of individualized feminism’,
and consequently, unlike other postfeminist images, ‘feminism is not
discredited as an outmoded totalizing academic or activist discourse’
(92). On the other, however, since the always-heterosexual postfemi-
nist subject is ‘white and middle-class by default’, postfeminist rep-
resentations of sisterhood marginalize ‘women of colour [who] are
either absent or are situated in a position of subordination’ (Tasker
and Negra, 2007: 2; Winch, 2013: 3). In postfeminist media culture,
sisterhood is a popular concept because of its gestures towards soli-
darity within femininity. As Alison Winch has shown, since the turn
of the millennium, there has been ‘a proliferation of locations within
the media that place primary emphasis on female sociality’ (Winch,
2013: 2). But, as Yvonne Tasker has illustrated, an increase in the rep-
resentations of female sociality in mainstream cinema stretches back
to the late 1980s and early 1990s; films like Steel Magnolias, Thelma
79
and Louise, and Fried Green Tomatoes are well-known examples that
were popular films amongst audiences, evidenced by their box-office
revenues (Tasker, 1998).
The three film adaptations that are the focus of this chapter –
Little Women (Armstrong, 1994), How to Make an American Quilt
(Moorhouse, 1995), and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (Khouri,
2002) – were also popular films at the box office that have at their
centre female sociality, or what I am calling ‘sisterhood’. I use the
term sisterhood because of the way it can evoke both feminine
intimacy and feminist solidarity, and also function as a postfemi-
nist commodity for female audiences. It also productively evokes
what Lauren Berlant has identified as ‘the intimate public sphere’
of women’s popular culture (Berlant, 2008: vii–viii). Like the early
twentieth-century adaptations that she considers, these contem-
porary ‘women’s films’ circulate as ‘the stuff’ of a contemporary
‘women’s intimate public’ that according to Berlant is
distinguished by a view that the people marked by femininity

already have something in common and are in need of a conver-
sation that feels intimate, revelatory, and a relief even when it is
mediated by commodities, even when it is written by strangers
who might not be women, and even when its particular stories are
about women who seem on the face of it, vastly different from each
other and from any particular reader. (Berlant, 2008: viii)
The three film adaptations in this chapter portray sisterhood, even as

it crosses generations, and in one includes women of colour, as place
of intimacy, revelation, and relief, while it both reinforces ‘feminine
conventionality’ and ‘thrives in proximity to the political’ (Berlant,
2008: x). Like the adaptations Berlant considers, Little Women, How to
Make an American Quilt, and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood are
all about sisterhood in America.
One of the key ways that these films exist in ‘proximity to the
political’ is through their female authorship reflected in the figure
of the woman author in the text. And as I note in Chapter 1, what
is particularly, politically, at stake for me, in all the adaptations in
this book, is the woman filmmaker. The Annual Celluloid Ceiling
numbers cited above remind us that the structural systems of main-
stream filmmaking remain stubbornly sexist, and often the exclusion
Authorizing the Mother 81
of women begins before they have made their first film. Gillian
Armstrong, the director of Little Women, and a woman filmmaker
who has had a long career like Jane Campion and Kathryn Bigelow
talks about how in the beginning it never occurred to her to pursue
the main authorial role: ‘I didn’t go to film school to be a director.
I didn’t think about it because there were no women directors …
the lecturers viewed us with some puzzlement – as if to say “What
are you girls going to do?”’ (Francke, 1995: 2809). A central premise
of this book is that while we must keep up the feminist fight over
women’s exclusion, part of the feminist film studies agenda must be
to write women’s film history as it is happening now before their
contributions are lost in the mainstream histories that will inevi-
tably side-line them. This book is one contribution to that history,
one that tries to emphasize how collaboration amongst women
has been a key strategy for women’s filmmaking. Through their
sisterhoods on the screen and in their production personnel, Little
Women, How to Make an American Quilt, and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya
Sisterhood (like other adaptations in this book) evoke the potentially
progressive idea of collaborative authorship amongst women in a
masculinized context. They do this, however, without overturning
the white, middle-class straightness of a mainstream cinema that
remains resolutely postfeminist. While choosing to think about the
production of these adaptations as spaces of ‘sisterhood’, I want to
keep in mind its potential and its limits, interrogating its tendency
to reduce political unity to affective community, covering over racial
and sexual difference.2
That both film adaptations I considered in Chapter 1 (Orlando
and Mansfield Park) have been written about extensively (along
with the many other classic-novel adaptations made by women in
the 1990s) is no surprise, since they are costume dramas based on a
long nineteenth-century novel, fulfilling the expectations of fidel-
ity on which adaptation studies was long based. Of course, many,
if not most, adaptations – including some of the most financially
successful – are based on novels of the twentieth century and are
very often contemporary, made within a few years of the book’s pub-
lication. This is the case with two of the three films discussed in the
present chapter (How to Make an American Quilt and Divine Secrets of
the Ya-Ya Sisterhood). However, all three films discussed here (includ-
ing Little Women, an adaptation of a nineteenth-century novel) were
very popular, ranking in the top 100 grossing films for their years
of release. As popular contemporary women’s films, they are often
referred to as ‘chick flicks’, a term that Callie Khouri, rightfully sug-
gest, ‘is not a term used to praise a movie. Nobody says “it’s a great
chick flick.” It’s a way of being derisive. I’m not clear why it’s ok to
do it’ (Silverstein, 2008b). In addition to their ‘sisterhoods’ on screen
and in production, all three were event films that attracted groups of
women attending the cinema together, making them conduits of a
‘women’s intimate public’. Their representations of mother-daughter
relationships within their various representations of ‘sisterhood’ per-
form a positive engagement with the issue of women’s generations
and generationalism, which, as I noted in Chapter 1, is a perpetually
problematic metaphor for feminists. And for all the film adaptations
in this book whiteness and the marginalization of women of colour
remains a problem. In addition, most (except those in Chapter 2)
have happy romantic conclusions, with sensitive men supportive
of protagonists’ authorial identities, that keeps them within the
boundaries of postfeminist media culture that suggests that equal-
ity, choice, and ‘feminist men’ are all readily available for women
(Projansky, 2001: 67–68). What interests me most about these popu-
lar adaptations, then, is how they deal with the tensions between the
individualized agency of authorship, the valorization of sisterhood,
and the compulsive heterosexuality of the romance narrative.
Little Women
In Unruly Girls, Unrepentant Mothers, her book analysing popular

screen representations of young girls and their ‘occasionally senti-
mentalized and idealized … [but] more often incompetent, mon-
strous, or just not there’ mothers, Kathleen Rowe Karlyn argues that
popular representations of mothers and daughters in contemporary
cinema and television must be considered in relation to the wave
metaphor that constructs the intergenerational history of feminism
and the postfeminist rejection of the label ‘feminist’ (2011: 12). In
the introduction she asks:
Where in film history is Marmee, the strong and beloved mother

of four daughters in Louise May Alcott’s Little Women? The 1868
novel has been made into movies numerous times, but failed to
inspire other, similarly rich treatments of mothers and daughters.

(2011: 13)
Her footnote to this passage notes that the two most famous ver-
sions are George Cukor’s of 1933 and Gillian Armstrong’s of 1994.
Armstrong’s version appears in the same time period as other films
in Karlyn’s focus on popular cinema of the 1990s and early 2000s,
such as Titanic (Cameron, 1997), Clueless (Heckerling, 1995), and the
Scream horror series that began in 1996; however Karlyn does not
include Little Women (1994) in her analysis, and we might assume
that one reason for its exclusion from her study is its identity as
a costume-drama film adaptation. And yet, Little Women, directed
by Armstrong and written by Robin Swicord, was the 27th highest
grossing film of 1994. This, of course, puts it well behind films like
Titanic or Scream, but higher than Clueless at 35, comparable to Mean
Girls (Waters, 2004) at 28 and close behind Legally Blonde (Luketic,
2001) at 22, all films Karlyn considers in her book. The cross-year
comparisons that I am making are by no means straightforward,
but they do give a flavour for the relative popularity of these films,
and in strict financial terms Little Women was a popular film, mak-
ing over 50 million dollars (US domestic) from an 18 million dollar
budget. In its second weekend it nearly tripled the income of its
opening weekend.3 This kind of money is well beyond the revenue
of the independent films of Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, and it made
more money in the US domestic market than Sense and Sensibility
(Lee, 1996), the most popular and acclaimed film of the Austen-
boom. As a film directed and written by women, based on a popular
nineteenth-century novel written by a woman, whose central theme
is the experience of young women and one in particular who wants
to be a writer, and as a book that largely appeals to female audiences,
Little Women stands out amongst the adaptations in this book, in
many ways.
A fair amount of scholarship exists on Armstrong’s Little Women;
much of it considers the film in relationship to the book and to the
other screen versions of Alcott’s novel. By including it in this chapter
on popular and contemporary novel adaptations, I want to argue,
not only, as Karen Hollinger and Teresa Winterhalter do, that the
filmmakers’ ‘read Alcott’s novel through its potential narrative sub-
versions and subtexts’, but also that the film can be seen as a version
of the popular female-friendship film (1999: 173). Reading it in this

way next to the two contemporary novel adaptations in this chapter
situates all of them in the context of larger cinema trends, rather
than just as adaptations, but also to take seriously their feminist
sensibilities. Even as a studio picture, Little Women, of course, shares
obvious characteristics with the films of Chapter 1 – it is a classic-
novel adaptation and a historical costume drama with a female pro-
tagonist. The key connection that I want to consider, though, is the
representation of authorship. Like Orlando’s and Mansfield Park’s uses
of Woolf and Austen respectively, Little Women presents its protago-
nist’s narrative as the woman artist’s struggle for self-authorization.
Hollinger and Winterhalter argue that the film’s Jo is a composite of
the novel’s Jo and Alcott herself and that Marmee’s character changes
are influenced by Alcott’s biography as well. They suggest that by
‘conflating author and characters, Swicord and Armstrong … make
[Marmee and Jo] champions of feminist causes and women unafraid
to speak up for themselves in a world dominated by men’ (1999:
177). Their repeated invocation of both Swicord and Armstrong
as the authors of the film, rather than relying on the tradition of
recognizing the director only as the author, implies that the film’s
authorship is collaborative, though they never explicitly make the
leap to construct a collaboration between the film’s authors and
the novels’ author, for which I have been arguing. Like Orlando and
Mansfield Park, at the conclusion of Little Women there is a novel that
has been produced by the protagonist, which the films suggest are
the books that the films have adapted. This is explicit in Armstrong
and Swicord’s film – the novel that Jo completes has the title on the
cover – Little Women. By changing Jo’s title, the filmmakers have
created a kind of Little Women triptych consisting of the film adapta-
tion, Jo’s manuscript, and Alcott’s novel. If the film ‘speaks to women
viewers today … through the fantasy of agency it offers’, I want to
suggest that we should also let it speak to us through the reality of
female agency that it offers. Written by, directed by, produced by,
and starring women, based on a book by a woman about women, the
film is a female tour de force.
Mothering female agency

Contemporary media representations of groups of women united
through friendship and/or familial bonds inevitably invoke the term
‘sisterhood’. Of course, the main characters of Little Women are four

sisters and their mother, who is at key times a part of their sisterhood,
and their neighbour boy Laurie, who is occasionally given an honor-
ary place as a ‘sister’; but the four March sisters are each other’s main
friendship group, at least for the first half of the film. Meg’s attend-
ance at Sally Moffat’s coming out party is one of the very few scenes
in which other women are included as friends of the March girls;
consequently, it is all the more significant that these other girl friends
are represented as a bad influence on Meg by encouraging her to wear
a dress with a décolletage of which her mother would disapprove
and to drink wine, contradicting March family tenets of plain living.
Though the novel does emphasize the ‘sisterhood’ of the sisters, there
are times when they socialize with other friends, such as with Laurie’s
English friends in Chapter 12. In the film, the lack of any other scenes
of socializing with friends, before they all go their separate ways in the
second half, relegates the male characters, including Father March,
Professor Bhaer, and even Laurie to being ‘boys on the side’ (Tasker,
1998: 140). In her analysis of early 1990s films such as A League of
Their Own (Marshall, 1994) and Now and Then (Glatter, 1995) Yvonne
Tasker shows how they ‘use … an evocation of the past to construct
a community of women (or girls …) in the “absence” of men’ (1998:
147). In the former, World War II keeps men on the side; in the latter,
boys are sidelined because the girls ignore them: the four girls of Now
and Then are at an age when they are more concerned with their trou-
bled families. In light of this, we can see how Little Women uses the
American Civil War to keep the March father on the side throughout;
and, for the first half, the sisters’ youth keeps boys on the side, too.
Though the film does ‘ignore the prevailing [Victorian] gender ideol-
ogy of separate spheres’ in the novel, this is achieved by presenting
characters of both genders as largely accepting of changes to women’s
roles in society, not by bringing men into the feminine community of
the March women (Hollinger and Winterhalter, 1999: 190).
The opening scene, which takes place at Christmas, replicates the
image of the young girls surrounding their mother as she reads a
letter from their father that is found in the original illustrations of
the novel and both earlier film versions (Hollinger and Winterhalter,
1999: 178). However, Swicord’s script alters the content of the let-
ter and consequently Father’s role in the narrative: in the novel
Father’s letter is full of moral instruction and admonitions for his
young daughters to become ‘little women’; in the film the letter

only describes the hardships of war and his love for his family. It is
Marmee who, later in the film before leaving home to attend to the
ill Mr March, uses the title in reference to her daughters: ‘Oh, how
I will miss my little women.’ Throughout Marmee speaks comfort
and guidance to her daughters, much of it evoking both nineteenth-
and twentieth-century feminist politics, such as her critique of the
effect of corsets on women’s constitutions, her explanation that
women’s lack of a vote and right to property are linked to the neces-
sity of female modesty, and her vision that her daughters will make
the world a better and more just place. By transferring the role of
moral guide from father to mother, the film transforms the opening
image from a family of women deferring to their patriarch’s wisdom,
into an image of a matriarchal clan in which the mother passes on
her feminist wisdom to her daughters.
Not only are men narratively marginalized, but those who do hover
around the March women are often visually ‘on the side’. Before he is
made an honorary member of the sisters’ Pickwick Papers writing and
playacting society, Laurie is introduced as a lonely figure who gazes
longingly on the familial camaraderie of the March women as they
pass by him in his wealthy grandfather’s carriage while they tromp
through the snow to take their Christmas breakfast to a poor family.
The next time we see him he is gazing out of his bedroom window,
alone and in the dark, as he looks up at the warm light and activity
of Jo reading aloud one of her stories published in the girls’ Pickwick
Portfolio. When the camera cuts from Laurie’s gaze to inside their
room, we are introduced to the Pickwick Club through the image of all
four wearing men’s hats, coats, trousers and Meg with a long pipe in
her mouth. The girls’ Dickensian character names, such as Nathaniel
Winkle, are translated into the visual construction of them using their
exclusively feminine and, therefore, safe space, to act like men. At
the centre is Jo’s writing, though she shares it with them by reading
it aloud, making her a storyteller like Fanny in Mansfield Park. Her
authorial ambitions are spoken aloud by Beth who says she should
publish it and ‘not just in the Portfolio’. As such, the film explicitly
links her authorial identity with her female community while signal-
ling the potential for it to cross the boundaries of gendered agency.
When, as I note above, Marmee says she will ‘miss her little
women’, the film pauses over a tableau of sisterhood at the centre
and ‘boys on the side’. Though Laurie has come to the house with
provisions for Marmee’s travels and Mr Brooks (Laurie’s tutor and
Meg, the eldest daughter’s’ beau) has come to offer himself as
an escort, the scene ends with the little women huddled around
Marmee, embracing each other. Only the tops of the two young
men’s heads are visible in the unfocused background. At this point,
halfway through the film, Mr March has been at war, off-screen,
most clearly kept on the side of this female household. Even when
their Father does come home, after all the women have run to give
him hugs, they gather at the foot of his chair for a brief moment,
and the women remain in a constant state of activity. Mr March
does little more than exclaim, ‘let me look at my girls’; while Meg
is conspicuously absent. In the earlier family tableaus with Marmee
at the centre, the camera remains static in a medium group shot
and the characters’ movements are limited by their closeness – they
are in what we might today call a ‘group hug’ with Marmee in the
middle. Mr March’s return does not restore any kind of patriarchal
norm or hardly disrupt the matriarchal order of things in the March
household; it is Marmee who gathers the daughters and gives orders.
Throughout the rest of the film, the patriarchal figure is kept on the
side: after the Christmas scene of his return, Father never speaks
another line. We catch a glimpse of him only a few more times – at
Meg’s wedding, after Beth’s death, and in a happy family scene near
the end when Amy and Laurie return from Europe a married couple.
Most significantly, after Beth dies, Marmee receives a letter from Amy
that she will not be able to return home from Europe to be with the
family, to which Marmee says ‘It is just as well’, and Jo replies, ‘Are
we never to be all together again?’ Father, in the background, says
nothing; he simply hangs is head and walks away. From the various
images of the young women all gathered around their mother, to
her authority over the household, to her giving permission for Jo
to go to New York and later encouraging her to use the house she
inherits from Aunt March for a school, to her speaking the title of
the novel and the film, the film makes it clear these are Marmee’s
‘little women’, not their father’s.
Karlyn shows that ‘since the 1990s, cinema has silenced mothers
in new ways, revealing cultural anxiety about the empowerment of
white middle-class women of the … Second Wave’ (2011: 13). The
appearance of Little Women in the mid-1990s – ascribed by Karlyn as
‘the decade of Girl Culture and Girl Power’ (2011: 13) – by no means
makes up for the ways that popular cinema generally disparages or
ignores mothers. But it does present us with the image of girls who
are guided and cared for and encouraged by a feminist mother, just
within the confines of a ‘literary film adaptation’, which, as I sug-
gested above, may well be why, despite its popularity that it has
been neglected by feminist film criticism. And yet, as I am trying
to show in this chapter, by considering the figure of the woman
author and the sisterhoods of which she is a part in both literary
and popular adaptations, we can see their feminist sensibilities in a
period of cinema that is now seen as dominated by ‘ironic heist films
and pop-culture referencing slasher movies’ and in which ‘facile self-
consciousness rather than heartfelt sensitivity won the day’ (Pulver,
2014). As I noted above, Marmee encourages Jo to go to New York,
where she works on her writing career, and, later, to think about
starting a school, in a moment when Jo imagines that she will be
‘a decrepit homeless spinster’. Throughout the novel, Marmee’s
admonishments to Jo are for her to control her temper, befitting
its theme of female moral perfection that can be achieved only by
‘conquer[ing] oneself and liv[ing] for others’ (Fetterley, 1979: 372).
Armstrong and Swicord’s rereading of the novel and its characters
means that a feminist mother guides the figure of agency, the woman
author, to fulfil her desire for self-expression. In light of this reading,
the film rejects the postfeminist generationalism that characterizes
the mother figure as the young woman’s main source of difficulty in
life, which occupies much contemporary cinema.
Authorial sisterhoods
The film does, though, fulfil some of the expectations of what Antje
Ascheid has called the Woman’s Heritage Film. Like many contempo-
rary postfeminist romances of the 1990s, the narrative conclusion for
a woman’s heritage film heroine requires signs of both independence
and traditional romance. For Jo these are the publication of her novel
and her reunion with Professor Bhaer. The acquisition of each requires
the acquisition of the other. While in New York, Bhaer encourages Jo’s
writing and offers to give her work to his publisher. But he also tells
her his truthful opinion that her first (gothic) novel has no life in
it because it has none of her in it. He suggests that she stop writing
fantasies and to write what she knows. Because of the novel’s fame,
many viewers of the adaptation will know that Jo eventually marries

Bhaer, and with that knowledge, this new scene seems to situate the
adaptation in the vein of women’s biopics, which frame the woman’s
identity through a romantic narrative that subordinates her agency
(Haiduc, 2013). And although writing herself into her novel is what,
eventually, Jo goes on to do, she takes Bhaer’s comments badly, and
she leaves without saying goodbye to him when she receives a tel-
egram telling her that Beth is dying. It is not until much later, after
Beth’s death that she is inspired to write Little Women. The scene of
inspiration is a textual expression of my argument for a sisterhood
of authorship. Jo enters the attic, which we have not seen since the
first half of the film, to put away some of Beth’s clothing and dolls.
It is the attic where the sisters role-played Jo’s stories and wrote the
Pickwick Portfolio together. She finds Beth’s trunk, embroidered with
her name, and upon opening it Jo finds Beth’s keepsakes – Victorian
paper dolls, embroidery, poems written by Jo, and most importantly,
the Pickwick Society Papers. She looks around the room, with tears
running down her face, and smiles, seemingly reminded of all the
writing and performing and sisterly bonding within the space. After
a glance at the papers again, her face becomes set with a determined
look, and then the film cuts to Jo writing at a desk by candle light, her
white collar and black dress suggesting that it is the same evening. As
she writes, we hear a voiceover. At first it is Beth’s voice ‘reading’ what
Jo is writing. She voices the scene when she receives a piano from
Laurie’s grandfather. Then we hear Amy’s voice, then Meg’s, then Jo’s,
then Laurie’s: each voicing a moment from the story of Little Women.
These voices are both a reading of Jo’s novel and a reading of the
film. This is exemplified by Jo’s voiceover. We hear her say, ‘as she
took off her bonnet, a general outcry arose, as all her abundant hair
was cut short’, immediately followed by Amy saying, ‘Jo! How could
you? Your one beauty’. Jo’s line performs as if she is reading the writ-
ing of the novel itself, but then Amy voices her own moment from
the film in the ‘same’ scene. Laurie speaks the final line, ‘Nothing is
going to change Jo’, but of course it has, which the music signifies by
replaying the girls singing of the hymn ‘For the Beauty of the Earth’
at Meg’s wedding, which was the beginning of the break-up of their
sisterhood. While the voiceovers speak, the camera slowly circle pans
the room, taking us away from Jo, so that the voices dominate, as if
all of them are writing the novel together through Jo.
Jo packages the novel, without a title, and sends it to Professor

Bhaer to give to his publisher. At the conclusion of the film, after
Amy and Laurie have returned, Jo finds the novel has been delivered
to her, and when she picks up the manuscript we see the title page –
Little Women, a novel by Josephine March. She discovers that Bhaer
had delivered the novel in person but left thinking Jo had married
when the housekeeper tells him, ‘Miss March and Mr Laurie live next
door’. Here, again, the postfeminist intertwining of Jo’s authorship
with romance and independence with coupledom are signified by
how Bhaer’s delivery of the novel is also the novel’s delivery of Bhaer
to Jo. Authorship has brought her romance and romance has brought
her authorship. But their union is not one of equals. Scholz shows
how Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility script rearticulates
Edmund’s desire for a ‘private life’, rather than a distinguished one,
makes him ‘a new type of male, one not conventionally associated
with romance’, and that this desire is evidence of his suitability for
the self-reliant and intellectual Elinor (2013: 132). Armstrong and
Swicord’s film constructs Professor Bhaer similarly. After he and Jo
have become engaged, he says, ‘But I have nothing to give you! My
hands are empty.’ Of course, Bhaer has already given her something,
but since the novel of Little Women in the film is published before
their reunion, Jo’s authorial identity is fulfilled before the conclusion
of her romantic narrative. Jo’s inheritance of her Aunt’s house – a
female legacy – reinforces the agency that her authorship represents
when it means that she can ask Bhaer to be the teacher at her new
school. The film ends on a typically romantic high when Jo puts her
hand in his and says, ‘Now, you do.’ They then they kiss, but without
anything to give her, Bhaer is a man ‘not beholden to the conven-
tional sexual division of labor’ (Scholz, 2013: 132), thus reinforcing
the film’s feminist rereading of the novel by denying Bhaer a clear
patriarchal role, while also appealing to the postfeminist valuation
of heterosexual romance.
Nobody says ‘it’s a great chick flick’

How to Make an American Quilt and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya
Sisterhood have significant narrative parallels: as noted above, both
films centre on a younger woman spending time with a group of
women from an older generation; both protagonists are engaged to
be married but are suffering from ‘cold feet’; the young women see
their mothers as the source of their fears about marriage; listening

to stories by the older women about their younger days helps the
younger woman to solve her fears; both protagonists are writers; and
both reconcile with their mothers. In terms of the film adaptations
of the novels, both, I would argue, fall on the ‘appropriation’ end of
the spectrum. Whitney Otto’s novel How to Make an American Quilt
is a non-linear narrative without the clear resolutions the film offers,
while Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood adapts not just Rebecca
Well’s novel by the same name, but also her collection of stories
Little Altars Everywhere, splicing them together. Being contemporary
and women’s popular fiction adaptations they escape fidelity criti-
cism in their reviews. Yet, both fit well within trends of postfeminist
1990s cinema that feminist critics have noted: female generations,
mother-daughter relationships, and the tension between romance
and independence.
Much lower than Little Women in the box-office rankings for their
years, both (How to Make an American Quilt [72] and Divine Secrets of
the Ya-Ya Sisterhood [40]) made it into the top 100. As adaptations
of contemporary novels, of course, they have received much less
academic attention than the classic-novel adaptations I have looked
at so far, and as popular chick flicks, they have also been generally
overlooked compared to the auteurist ‘art’ films of Chapter 2. As
both these things, though, they can be seen as a part of a successful
type of film that recurs throughout the 1990s – popular adapta-
tions of contemporary novels about female friendships and family
relationships, which include several ranked in the top 50 highest-
grossing films for their years: Fried Green Tomatoes (Avnet, 1991),
ranked #11; The Joy Luck Club (Wang, 1993), ranked #48; Waiting to
Exhale (Whitaker, 1995), ranked #16; The First Wives Club (Wilson,
1996), ranked #11; and Practical Magic (Dunne, 1998), ranked #45.
For their success, these films rely on, to varying degrees, the popu-
larity of the source novel, the centrality of women’s stories, the
stars in lead roles, and their appeal to female audiences, both who
know the book and do not know the book. Little Women, How to
Make an American Quilt and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood rely
on the same things for their popularity and have the similar theme
of intergenerational relationships amongst women. The key differ-
ence between the films in this chapter and those mentioned above
is, of course, female authorship – in terms of both the figure of the
woman author in the text and the women filmmakers behind the
camera. As I have demonstrated with Little Women, this section will
think about how How to Make an American Quilt and Divine Secrets
of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood present sisterhood as vital for female agency.
The important difference between them and Little Women – whose
sisterhood consists of a mother guiding her four daughters – is that
these two films’ sisterhoods consists of groups of older women guid-
ing one daughter figure. In both, the younger woman’s character
is defined by authorship: Finn Dodd of How to Make An American
Quilt is a graduate student writing her thesis, and Siddalee Walker
of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood is a playwright. The older
generation of the sisterhood are also authors of a kind, signalled by
their ‘feminine’ crafts – quilting in the former and scrapbooking in
the latter – that women’s studies scholars of the 1980s and 1990s
recuperated into women’s histories. Each uses flashback to show the
older women’s stories, which begin when they start telling them to
their captive audience of one, figuring their authorial identities not
just in the quilting and scrapbooking but also in their identities as
storytellers, much like Fanny in Chapter 1 and Jo above. This sec-
tion considers how women’s female authorship is figured in the
adaptations in different forms for the protagonist and the motherly
sisterhood, but also argues that together they function as a conduit
of female community and agency, both of which are necessary for
restoring the mother-daughter relationship. It also suggests that
we can see the authorial agency of the women filmmakers through
this representation of authorship, and in the ways the films fulfil
Hollywood conventions while they also ‘succeed … in generating
within the text of the film, an internal criticism of it’ ( Johnston,
1999: 38).
How to Make an American Quilt
Like Little Women, How to Make an American Quilt presents a sis-

terhood of authorship both in the text and in the production of
the film. Women fill most of the key production roles: director
( Jocelyn Moorehouse), screenwriter ( Jane Anderson), producer
(Sarah Pillsbury and Midge Sanford), executive producer (Laurie
McDonald and Deborah Newmyer), and editor ( Jill Bilcock). It is
also, of course, adapted from a novel by a woman author which was
a New York Times bestseller. Produced by Universal Pictures, the film

is also a mainstream film rather than an independent film; conse-
quently its ‘sisterhood’ of production personnel is notable and for
some reviewers (particularly women reviewers) their authorial sig-
nature within the confines of this Hollywood film is there for all to
see. Caryn James of The New York Times says ‘Off camera and on, the
women who put this film together … obviously shared a vision that
conspires to make the characters strong and sentimental but never
saintly, the film emotional but never sappy’ (James, 1995), and in her
Sight and Sound review, Liese Spencer says, ‘From its female produc-
tion team to its ensemble narrative, How to Make an American Quilt
is an exemplary “woman’s picture” for the 90s, skillfully embroider-
ing the once-despised form with modern mores’ (Spencer, 1996: 44).
Drawing on Claire Johnston’s reading of the ‘internal contradic-
tions’ that show the authorial signature of Dorothy Arzner in her
Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s, my analysis of this main-
stream popular ‘woman’s film’ that is an adaptation of a bestselling
novel, also argues for seeing the authorial signature of the women
filmmakers in the internal contradictions of the film, as well as in
the adaptation process.
In the film, Winona Ryder plays Finn Dodd, a graduate student
completing her thesis – ‘not a book’ as she explains to her great
aunt – on ‘women’s handiwork in various tribal cultures’ after having
abandoned two previous topics, including one on ‘something about
the Victorians’. Reinforced by Ryder’s stardom, Finn is presented
as an undisciplined and wayward Gen X-er, as well as a third-wave
feminist.4 Her boyfriend, Sam, is remodelling their house, and she
decides to spend the summer with her grandmother and great aunt
in Grasse – a fictional small town in the California valley full of
orange and lemon groves. Her grandmother and aunt are part of a
quilting bee with seven women, some of whom have been friends
since childhood. Finn claims the summer away from Sam is to fin-
ish her thesis and to interview the group’s leader Anna Lee (played
by Maya Angelou) who used to work for Finn’s Great Aunt Glady
Joe and her sister, Finn’s grandmother, Hy. That these older female
relatives of Finn’s are played by Anne Bancroft and Ellen Burstyn,
whose best known roles are of mothers (The Graduate [Nichols, 1967]
and The Exorcist [Friedkin, 1973]) in canonical New Hollywood films,
reinforces the generational difference between them and Finn but
also evokes, intertextually, the parents of the baby-boom genera-

tion. Finn’s summer away makes Sam nervous because he has just
proposed, and while she packs, she thinks to herself, ‘How do you
merge into this thing called a couple and still keep a little room
for yourself?’ Upon her arrival, the quilting bee make Finn nervous
when she discovers they are making her wedding quilt, called ‘Where
Love Resides’. The film’s structure reflects their communal work and
Finn’s thesis on women’s arts and crafts by being a ‘patchwork’ of
each woman’s story. Told through flashbacks, the stories of Hy, Glady
Joe, Em, Sophia, Anna, Marianna and Constance all revolve around
the search for and the obstacles to love and identity. They are all nar-
ratives of what Berlant calls the female complaint: ‘women live for
love, and love is the gift that keeps on taking’ (2008: 21).
Finn’s graduate degree, her fiancé, the quilting bee, and their vari-
ous (hi)stories, all come directly from the novel. It is, though, post-
modern in its form, with fragmented styles, voices and discourses. It
begins and ends with Finn’s first-person voice; it tells each character’s
past through a third-person voice (ostensibly Anna’s); and it includes
discourses on the history of, and how-to advice on, quiltmaking that
begin each of the chapters, which are called INSTRUCTIONS No. 1
(and so on). In his article, ‘How to (Re)Make an American Quilt’,
Marshall Deutelbaum gives a detailed analysis of the translation
of the novel to film and shows how, ‘the adaptation … was guided
more by the familiar norms of classical story construction than by
fidelity to the novel’ (2004: 309). In both, Finn’s thesis on women’s
craftwork and the quilting bee itself evoke women’s studies scholar-
ship of the 1980s and 1990s that recuperated women’s crafts as art
and central to women’s history. Moreover, quilting in the novel and
its patchwork form invoke the traditions and history of writing by
American women, identified and historicized by Elaine Showalter in
her book Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s
Writing. Showalter says that by the 1980s, ‘Both theme and form in
women’s writing, piecing and patchwork ha[d] … become metaphors
for a Female Aesthetic, for sisterhood, and for a politics of feminist
survival’ (Showalter, 1994: 146). Both the novel and the film, by
putting women’s quilting at the centre of the narrative content and
then evoking that content in the narrative structure are representa-
tive of popular culture’s growing awareness of academic feminism
in the 1990s (McRobbie, 2009: 33). In addition, published in 1991,
the novel seems very aware of 1980s feminist metacritical work that
constructs feminist literary criticism and women’s historiography as
a continually growing patchwork quilt.5 The INSTRUCTIONS include
details on how to make quilts but also explanations of different types
of quilts and their histories, highlighting how different groups of
women at different times and places have championed the qualities
of different types of quilts.6 These include Victorian quilts, African-
American quilts and the Names Quilt that memorialized AIDs vic-
tims. For Géraldine Chouard, ‘The patchwork quilt in Otto’s text is
perhaps in that sense the ultimate metaphor for the postmodern,
de-centred and non-hierarchic, breaking systemized principles and
orderly structures’ (2003: 63).
Still, the novel does begin with Finn’s very heteronormative and
postfeminist concerns about her fiancé’s proposal and ‘how one …
accomplishe[s] such a fusion of selves’ (Otto, 5). And it comes to a
conclusion with a relatively conservative declaration by Finn:
I’ll tell you what makes me happy about marrying Sam, that is,
about marrying in general: I know our marriage has just as good
a chance of being wonderful as it does of missing the mark. There
is a strong possibility that it will be both. And, contrary to what
current belief is, it has always been so. This is a tremendous relief.
I came to understand this from talking with Anna about the vari-
ous quilters. However, I am banking on our love for each other to
weigh a bit heavier on the ‘wonderful’ side. I do not expect to be
wrong about this. It is a matter of faith. (Otto, 178)
The romance plot is still the thread that holds the fragmented nar-
rative together. This is especially hard to ignore when femininity
in all the characters is constructed by compulsory heterosexuality.
There is no hint of lesbianism or gender disruption in any of the
women’s stories. Though Chouard suggests that the film, compared
to the novel, lacks any ‘subtle layering and exposure of meaning’
the novel’s compulsive heterosexuality suggests its postmodern
form contains fairly conventional content, which the film reiter-
ates (2003: 72). Within that conventionality, though, the feminine
practice of quiltmaking is what brings the women together, author-
izes their stories and offers to the reader/viewer an ‘intimate public
[that] legitimates qualities, ways of being, and entire lives that have
otherwise been deemed puny or discarded [and] it creates situations

where those qualities can appear as luminous’ (Berlant, 2008: 3).
Legitmizing marginalized ways of being has been a central tenet of
feminism, especially in its women’ studies approaches to women’s
history and their, largely, domestic existences. This then is the way
the text ‘thrives in proximity to the political’.
Storytelling
In the film, the women’s stories do explicitly affective work teaching
Finn (and the audience) lessons about sisterhood, romance, mar-
riage, motherhood, and female identity, offering her insight into
the impasse she is facing. Her predicament, of course, is her fear of
marriage, even though she ‘may have found her soulmate and 26
is not an unreasonable age to get married’. On a visit, Sam accuses
her of being like her mother who has had a string of boyfriends,
all of whom she eventually dumped, to which Finn emphatically
says, ‘I am not like my mother!’ At the end of the film, each woman
puts her story on a piece for Finn’s wedding quilt. Glady and Hy’s
relationship is presented as loyal but combative; they share a house
in their widowhood; they nit-pick at each other but also share a
marijuana joint on the porch with Finn. Their history, or (in keeping
with the third-wave women’s studies ethos of the two texts) herstory,
is one of betrayal and disloyalty: Hy’s husband is dying of cancer and
in a weak moment she has sex with Glady’s husband. Glady throws
dishes and knickknacks in her rage, which she kept alive by plaster-
ing all the pieces to the walls of the laundry room, (only forgiving
her husband on his deathbed); the walls of broken ceramic are a sign
that she has still not forgiven her sister. Sophia’s story is the story of
The Feminine Mystique. She meets her husband, Preston, at the local
pool after she executes a perfect back dive; not a competitive diver,
she says ‘I do it for myself’. Before their first date, her working-class
single mother tells her tipsily that educated boys like Preston prefer
women who listen. The date ends up at a swimming hole where
they embrace in the water, half-dressed, the camera focused on her
breasts and his hands. Then the scene cuts to Sophia lying in bed
with a crying baby in a basinet next to her. Preston is leaving for an
archaeological dig in Colorado, and she tells him her fear that he will
run away. They have three children, and when they are teenagers
Sophia’s depression is so oppressive that Preston builds a pond for
her to remind her of the swimming hole she no longer visits because,
she says, ‘I became a wife.’ He then leaves, and as Hy tells Finn, ‘He
never came back.’ This leads up to Finn and Sam’s fight about her
cold feet: a result of her incredulity when he suggests that they might
have a spare room for a baby. The lessons from Glady and Hy’s and
Sophia’s stories seem only to reinforce Finn’s fears. When she calls
Sam after the fight, a woman answers the phone, and she becomes
convinced that he is cheating on her. Em of the quilting bee tells
Finn the story of her philandering artist husband Dean, whom she
has come to believe ‘is more typical, than not’, and then the tension
between Em and Constance is revealed: after Constance’s husband –
‘the love of my life’ – died, she slept with Dean. These stories are
related to Finn’s life both through her fears of his affair and her own
dalliance with the lifeguard at the local pool. Up to this point, Glady,
Hy and Constance’s stories suggest that there is not much to the
‘sisterhood’, and Sophia’s and Em’s stories feed into Finn’s anxieties
that she will lose her identity when married.
Finn’s flirtation with a local lifeguard hits its peak with a planned
date, but before they go out, she meets Anna, to learn about her
family quilts. Anna says to Finn, ‘I don’t take these quilts out for
everybody as you know. I just don’t do it.’ Finn’s research seems to
be the implied reason why Anna has made an exception this time.
She lays out on the bed a quilt made by her great-great grandmother;
‘She called it The Life Before’, Anna says, ‘It’s a story quilt. It’s meant
to be read.’ The quilt tells the romantic story of how Anna’s great
grandparents met – newly freed from slavery, a young woman fol-
lows a crow to find a young man building a home and ‘the search
for her parents led her to the man God intended her to marry’.
Maya Angelou, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and author of the
well-known I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, plays Anna. Angelou’s
celebrity and respect as a writer brings some gravitas to the film,
evoking the novel’s description of Anna as a woman who refused
‘to be a spectre in [her] own world’ and who is the ‘undisputed
leader and founder of the Grasse Quilting Circle (recognized nation-
ally for superior and original work)’ (Otto, 133). More importantly
she embodies an ideal of the agency of women’s authorship that
is reflected in the story quilt as black women’s handiwork that ‘is
meant to be read’. African-American scholars have shown how black
women’s quiltmaking was an important form of both social labour
and leisure, and also how their crafts have been left out of the history
of women’s crafts. Meanwhile, Floris Barnett Cash shows the impor-
tance of anthropologists’ and historians’ work in uncovering that
history because ‘the voices of black women are stitched within their
quilts’ (30). African-American writers have often written these voices
into their novels; Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Toni Morrison’s
Beloved are two of the most well-known novels by African-American
women writers in which ‘the implication that quilting is integral
to African-American women’s experience recurs’ (Kelley, 1994: 49).
Angelou’s casting brings all these intertexts with her, seemingly
inviting black women into the intimate public space of How to Make
an American Quilt.
The film keeps the novel’s basic story of the quilt (not the story in
the quilt to which I will return) that is promised to Anna by her Aunt
Pauline with whom she lives. Pauline sells the quilt to her mistress
for much needed money. Anna is upset by the sale and steals it when
she runs away, pregnant after one night with a white boy. She stays
with the Rubens, Hy and Glady’s family, who take in pregnant girls
until they give birth and give the baby up for adoption. Glady Joe
admires the quilt and asks to be taught the craft, which is the story of
how Anna came to work for Glady Joe, as well as the origin-story of
her leadership of the quilting bee. The story in the quilt, though, has
been changed from novel to film. In the novel, ‘The Life Before’ quilt
is not a romantic story; instead it comprises images of ‘Africa scenes:
animals with tusks, warriors clashing with spirits and themselves and
beasts … This was all before the ships and the block and the coffle.
Before the mix of blood no white family would acknowledge’ (Otto,
134). The romantic meeting of Anna’s grandparents in the film’s
quilt changes the novel’s quilt into a fairytale of love that Anna
aspires to as a young woman and that eventually resolves Finn’s own
romantic narrative, which I discuss below. Anna tells Finn that as a
young girl, listening to her Aunt read the quilt, she hoped a similar
magic would bring her the love of her life, but when her daughter
was born she learnt that the love for and of her child was the only
love she needed. Her daughter Marianne never gets married either. In
the novel, she moves to France and has a series of affairs, realizing,
‘There was something in her that spurned marriage … All she knew
was that she was capable – not destined – to love more than one man
at a time, and that this could hardly be good for marriage’ (173). In
the film, Marianna shows Finn a pile of pictures, each of a different

lover, and then laughing says, ‘All these men trying to tie me down.
“Marry me; marry me!” in five different languages … I refuse to be
tied down to anyone.’
In the midst of all the other women whose stories are about
marriage, Anna’s and Marianna’s never-married status stands out.
Though they are far from the stereotype of the ‘welfare queen’, the
singleness of both inevitably raises the spectre of the tropes of the
African-American woman as the a-sexualized mother and the overly
sexed black woman. Finn replies positively to Marianna’s resistance
to marriage and goes on a rant that begins, ‘What they don’t tell
us is that marriage is an anachronistic institution created for the
sole convenience of the Father…’, before expanding a feminist-
influenced critique of patriarchal family structures, and concluding,
‘now that we have our independence there is no purpose to marriage;
why can’t we love as many people as we want?’ Marianna questions
Finn as to whether her fiancé is aware of her ideas, and in response,
Finn asks if she would choose to marry a lover or a friend. Marianna
says that she would marry her ‘soul mate’, and then tells her story:
Marianna is in Paris, having ‘just turned 30’ and has ended another
affair. A dashing man offers his handkerchief for her tears and they
spend the afternoon through the evening together, discussing poetry
and love. When she asks him to dinner, he says he has dinner plans
with his wife, but gives her a poem he wrote while watching her. In
contrast, in the novel, there is no soul mate. She ‘used to think that
her many lovers were the sign of a great capacity to love … Now she
knows that it was an inability to love’ (Otto, 174). The romanticiza-
tion of Anna’s and Marianne’s stories brings them in line with the
other stories’ modes of personal intimacy and revelation, including
them in the film’s expression of the female complaint through all the
women’s stories, from which Finn must learn.
Rewriting the mother

There is one more woman, though, who has been off-screen for the
entire film, to whom Finn needs to listen: her mother, Sally. Three-
quarters of the way through the film, Finn finds Sally sitting in a tree
swing at Glady and Hy’s house, where she has come to see Finn to
tell her that after running into each other and ‘catching up’ she and
Finn’s father are getting remarried. Played by Kate Capshaw, Sally’s
fringed suede jacket, crochet blouse, jeans and ankle bracelet identify
her as an eternal hippy and clearly signify her as a woman who came
of age during second-wave feminism, a representative of the 1970s
Me Generation. Her rejection of marriage and commitment within
heterosexual coupledom fulfils the stereotype of the second-wave
feminists that was constructed through the backlash politics of the
1980s. Finn feels that her anxieties about marriage and her fling with
a local lifeguard are direct results of her mother’s rejection of tradi-
tional femininity. She says to her mother, ‘I grew up with you telling
me marriage is bullshit … the imprints been made; I’m a mess!’ As
such, they are a postfeminist picture of the relations between second-
wave mothers and third-wave daughters that Karlyn interrogates in
films like Titanic and Scream in which the mother figure must be left
behind or dead for her daughter to fulfil her destiny. Another way to
think about the film’s ‘proximity to politics’ is through the mother-
daughter relationship and the way that it displaces rage: ‘When
young adults displace their problems, whether personal or social,
onto their midlife mothers, they are displacing anger more rightly
directed at other targets, such as patriarchy or cutthroat capitalism’
(Karlyn, 2011: 245). As everyone knows, Generation X, (of which,
I note above, Ryder, as a star, is a recognizable representative) came of
age during a recession in North America, following the stock market
crash of 1987. If Finn is 26 in 1995 (the year of the film), she would
have been 21 in 1990. This means that she would be near finishing
her Bachelor’s degree at the height of the recession. That she is in
graduate school, working on the third iteration of her thesis takes on
a different meaning when we step away from the stereotype of Gen
Xers as undisciplined and goalless. Instead, she becomes another sta-
tistic of the many who, in times of economic downturn, choose to
continue on in higher education in the hopes that more opportuni-
ties will be available when they complete the degree.7 She may rage
at her mother for not being a model of commitment and ‘messing’
her up, but Finn’s fears of commitment are clearly not just about her
impending marriage.
In fact, Sally recognizes her daughter’s need to place blame and
accepts it. She protests that she never claimed that ‘marriage is
bullshit’, saying ‘why would I say something so stupid?’ But she does
not return Finn’s rage or return blame, instead saying, ‘Maybe I’ve
been a flake and you want to tie me up into a slideshow of my crimes.
Ok. Fine. But then move on. And live your life.’ When Finn asks Sally
why she has never told her whether she likes Sam, Sally tells her it
shouldn’t matter what she thinks. Sally may be no Marmee but she is
able to offer wisdom and acceptance to her daughter when she needs
it. In the novel, Sally takes up even less time than she does in the
film. In fact, she never speaks. In Hy’s story she is described as the
‘free-love’ girlfriend of Hy’s son, though they eventually got married
and quickly divorced. The filmmakers have included her, fleshed out
her character, and used her to begin resolving Finn’s dramatic angst,
not by making her abject but by revealing that she is exactly the
opposite; she is not the romantic snob that Sam makes her out to be
when he imagines her thoughts as ‘why am I even with a carpenter?
Why am I not with someone smarter? A little bit better? Someone
who doesn’t even care about me?’ And it turns out Finn is not like
her because she is not like Finn thought she was. Kim Golombisky is
right when she argues, ‘Renewing the Mother-Daughter symbolic is
a powerfully subversive message because of “cultural fears about the
mother-daughter bond – a liaison seen as dangerously symbiotic”’
(2001: 80).
At the end of their conversation, a sudden and strong wind blows,
pulling washing off the line and moving everything not tied down,
including the pages of Finn’s thesis (which she has written on a
typewriter because she ‘doesn’t trust computers; they lose things’).
Some critics complain that the wind’s magical intervention is an
‘unforgivable’ deux ex machina (Ebert, 1995). Sudden, strong winds,
known as the Santa Ana Winds, do occur in California (usually in the
Autumn and Winter); however, in this context the wind functions to
resolve magically the (white) women’s stories: Em is about to leave
her husband, but flees to his art studio, finding her husband’s con-
stancy in all the loving portraits of her throughout their life; in an
attempt to gather up some of the thesis, Sophia finds her way into
the wading pool Preston built for her; and while cleaning up debris
in the laundry room, Glady Joe starts to break down the knick-knack
plastered walls. Upon hearing the noise Hy steps into the room for
the first time and the sisters share a reconciling smile at each other.
Finn, though, is frustrated by the impossibility of gathering up all
the scattered papers of her thesis. While standing in the doorway of
her grandmother’s house with her mother in the background pick-
ing up pieces of the thesis in the garden, she says to Hy, ‘I’m never
going to find them all … It’s a year and a half of my life gone … I’ll
never be able to reconstruct it.’ Hy replies, in a motherly fashion,
‘I hope you’re not thinking about giving up.’ When Finn replies in
the affirmative, Hy says in a tone that is clearly meant to convey a
rebuke, ‘How nice to be so unattached to something’. Finn returns
to gathering up her thesis, and though her lifeguard fling appears,
suggestively eating a box of strawberries, she does not go to him.
The film then cuts to a close up of a table covered in pages of the
thesis and tilts up to show Finn slowly reordering them, before pan-
ning to the right to show the women of the quilting bee at a table
behind Finn, working on the quilt. Finn’s voiceover tells us ‘the
Grasse Quilting Bee did something they had never done before …
Anna wouldn’t let them go home until they finished the quilt. They
all worked for 73 straight hours.’ In the brief moment depicting Finn
in the foreground putting her thesis back together and the women in
the background finishing the quilt, the thesis and the quilt become
metaphors for each other, and the older women’s and Finn’s authorial
identities mirror each other. Sustained by the commitment of the
women behind her, Finn’s fears of commitment are resolved by fulfill-
ing her authorial identity. The reconciliation scene with her mother is
not in Otto’s novel, nor is Finn’s return to authorship. Here, the film-
makers reflect their own authorial position by representing the dif-
ficulties of being a female author (in however a fantastical cinematic
metaphor) and that working together with other women can be a
way to overcome those difficulties.
Internal contradictions
Several days after the sudden wind storm, and after putting her thesis
back together, during which time the bee finishes her wedding quilt,
Finn wakes to find the finished quilt covering her. A crow appears
outside her window. She throws the quilt around her shoulders,
and then follows it like Anna’s great-grandmother did. It leads her
through an orange grove to Sam who is sleeping in his van, having
driven overnight to be with her. However, at this point How to Make
an American Quilt chooses to undercut its emphasis on marriage as
the fulfilment of female subjectivity. Over the image of Sam and Finn
kissing, her voiceover repeats the line from the novel about their love
‘weighing heavier on the wonderful side’, but after these romanti-
cized comments about love she quotes Anna on quiltmaking: ‘There
are no rules you can follow; you have to go by instinct and you have
to be brave.’ These words are voiced over a camera pan that rises
above the couple and tilts to the blue sky. After the word ‘brave’, it
tilts down for a view of present-day Sophia, standing on the high
dive, overlooking an inviting pool, empty of people. The camera
then cuts to view her from behind. She is older and less svelte in her
swimsuit and bathing cap than when we saw her dive in her youth,
before she was married and a mother. But then she leaps from the
board and stretches out her arms in a graceful dive, and the musi-
cal score changes from a rising clarinet to a high string-instrument
crescendo. The film’s final image is of Sophia’s dive-splash in the
pool – thus, an image not of the heterosexual couple (as we may
expect of a heteronormative text), but of the older woman rediscov-
ering the thing that made her most happy in her youth, the thing
that she lost upon marrying and becoming a mother.
This ending is not in the novel. In the novel, the romantic con-
clusion is undercut by Finn and Anna driving to San Francisco
together in which they have a long talk because Finn wants to
know ‘everything’, which, as the image of a young white woman
learning from her African-American female elder, is arguably more
progressive than Sophia diving (Otto, 179). However, this secondary
conclusion of the film that comes after the expected union of the
couple calls to mind both Hollywood and independent films that
feminist film critics have lauded for similar techniques that disrupt
heteronormative conclusions – such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (in
which the final image is of the two women in their wedding dresses,
with their grooms out of frame) and The Piano (Ada’s dream of her
death, attached to her piano beneath the sea offers an alternative to
her domestic life in Nelson).8 It is, I think, a very cinematic ending,
if one agrees with the critical view that moving images without dia-
logue or voiceover are the most pure form of cinema: it shows Sophia
alone on the high dive, at first as if the camera is sitting on the edge
of the pool and then it cuts so that the camera is behind her. When
she jumps, the crane shot gives us a bird’s eye view of her and follows
her into the pool, lingering over the image of the white splash in
the centre of the greenish-blue water that fills the frame. The ending
opens up an internal contradiction within the Hollywood conven-
tions, refusing the dominant ending of heterosexual coupledom,
offering another sign of the women filmmakers’ authorial signature.
However, as I suggested at the beginning of this chapter, images

of sisterhood in women’s intimate public often reduce the potential
politics of solidarity to affect. When she follows the crow to find
Sam, Finn’s months in Grasse spent listening to the women of the
bee, having an affair, and writing her thesis are now paralleled with
Anna’s great-grandmother’s months of journeying after being freed
from slavery, looking for her parents who ‘had been sold long ago’
and finding her husband instead. The romantic story of Anna’s
grandparents skips the twentieth-century generations represented
by Anna, her Aunt Pauline, and her daughter Marianna, but then it
returns to ‘bless’ the young white woman Finn with idealized roman-
tic heterosexual coupledom. Any potential political meaning in
Anna’s story about the maternal legacies of African-American women
is subsumed by the conventional Hollywood resolution, making
Anna’s story quilt do the affective work of bringing about a romantic
happy ending (for a young, privileged, white woman) and the relief
offered by women’s intimate public. As Berlant argues:
embedded in the often sweetly motivated and solidaristic activ-

ity of the intimate public of femininity is a white universalist
paternalism, sometimes dressed as maternalism. As long as they
have had a public sphere, bourgeois white women writers have
mobilized fantasies of what black and working-class interiority
based on suffering must feel like in order to find a language for
their own more privileged suffering at the hands of other women,
men, and callous institutions. (Berlant, 2008: 6)
Unfortunately, by co-opting the story quilt for Finn, the expecta-

tions of Hollywood conventionality and the women filmmakers’
authorship (found in the changes from the novel) come together to
‘find a language’ for the ‘privileged suffering’ of women that Finn
represents. This white universalist maternalism is countered to some
extent by the casting of Angelou which strengthens the visual rep-
resentation of quilting as black women’s authorship and reinforces
her leadership position over all the other women. After the wind
storm, it is Anna who ‘called everyone back and wouldn’t let them go
home until they finished the quilt; they worked for 73 hours straight
sustained by Anna’s sheer will’. But the appropriation of the story of
her family’s history as a signifier of Finn and Sam’s marriage as ‘fated’
keeps Anna, her Aunt Pauline, and her daughter Marianne, who are
all unmarried, outside the valorization of marriage that all the white
women’s stories project, except Sophia’s, while also leaving them out
of the liberal feminist image of individual fulfilment that her dive
seems to represent, making Anna’s reflections on maternal love and
Marianne’s reflections on lost love act as a kind of chorus to Finn’s
narrative of maternal and romantic reconciliation.
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
Like Little Women and How to Make an American Quilt the adaptation of
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood is a woman-directed film based on
a woman-authored novel. The film is Callie Khouri’s directorial debut
after she became famous for writing the Academy-Award winning
script Thelma and Louise. She also rewrote the script Divine Secrets of the
Ya-Ya Sisterhood after an initial draft by Mark Andrus. With key roles
such as cinematographer and editor filled by men, the production of
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood does not constitute a ‘sisterhood of
authorship’ to the same degree as the previous two film adaptations
in this chapter. However, Bonnie Bruckheimer with Hunt Lowry pro-
duced the film, and it has three women amongst its executive produc-
ers, including the star Bette Midler. Being Khouri’s first time as director,
the film was highly anticipated because of the name recognition she
had acquired with Thelma and Louise and the subsequent cultural
debates about the feminist politics of the film.9 The novel, by Rebecca
Wells, was a number one New York Times Bestseller (staying in the list
for 68 weeks) and was short-listed for the Orange Prize for Women’s
Fiction in 2000.10 Trysh Travis has shown how the novel’s popularity
grew over time from its initial paperback printing of 15,000 to 250,000
copies in print within a year. The fans of the novel were not unlike
the fans of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club and its film adaptation who
infamously started their own local fight clubs.11 Travis reports that:
During her [early book] tours, Wells had noticed that Ya-Ya Clubs –
not reading groups per se, but informally organized groups of
women who had read the books – were forming spontaneously
all over the country. Women rechristened themselves with Ya-Ya-
style names, organized drinking rituals, and attended Well’s read-
ings wearing placards with ‘Ya-Ya’ printed on them (2003: 140).
Harper Collins capitalized on the novel’s popularity by creating an

interactive website for fans, which only grew bigger when the film
adaptation was released.12 Travis argues that the novel’s corporatized
fan culture is exemplary of the increasing corporatization of trade
publishing that made audiences’ apparently ‘grassroots’ communi-
ties into additional corporate commodities, and that it is nearly
impossible for them to constitute any form of resistive practice
of the kind identified by Janice Radway in her influential study,
Reading the Romance: Patriarchy and Popular Literature. Here, I am less
concerned with the possible resistive practices that audiences put
the novel and the film to use, and instead more interested in how
as a popular women’s novel adapted into a popular women’s film
both invite women to consume them as spaces of an intimate pub-
lic of femininity that registers women’s discontent with the status
quo but then displaces any political critique of it onto interpersonal
affective relationships, especially those between women. Like How
to Make an American Quilt, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood’s nar-
rative of the restorative power of sisterhood and the reconciliation
of the mother-daughter relationship offers intimacy, revelation and
relief in the intimate public of women’s popular culture that has
been commodified, as Berlant shows, since the early part of the
twentieth century.
In the film of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Siddalee Walker
is a successful New York playwright who in an interview with Time
magazine reveals less than flattering details about her mother. In
a rage, her mother Vivi disowns her, and Sidda returns the favour.
Vivi’s lifelong friends, the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, intervene by taking
Sidda away to a family cabin in the Louisiana bayou, and keep her
there while they tell her the story of her mother’s life through the
scrapbook the friends keep. Before hearing the whole story, Sidda,
breaks off her engagement for fear of turning out like her mother
who, after beating her children, disappeared for several months
when Sidda was young. But, the sisterhood’s revelations bring relief
to Sidda’s angst, and she is reconciled with her mother in the end. In
an inversion of How to Make an American Quilt, the mother-daughter
relationship is the story of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and
the romance plot functions in service to the more primary relation-
ship. The film marginalizes the romance narrative even more than
the novel, and its sublimation allows for the sisterhood to be more
prominent in Sidda’s life. As storytellers of Vivi’s life, they become

authorial figures through their increased role in reconciling Sidda
with her mother.
Both the novel and the film have dual timelines that are split
between the present-day narrative of Siddalee and the ‘flashback’
narrative of the life of her mother Viviane Abbot Walker. The film
begins in 1937 with four young girls – Vivi, Teensie, Caro, and Necie –
who sneak out at night into the woods of Louisiana to make a lifelong
pact to be in the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, of which Vivi is Queen. The novel
begins in the New York apartment of Sidda, who is a theatre direc-
tor (rather than a playwright as she is in the film) who, as she says
herself, has, ‘a great life’: ‘I’m marrying the man I love … My career
is taking off. I am successful. I have friends who celebrate my success.
Everything is fine, really it is’ (Wells, 8). In the interview with Time,
she unwittingly details Vivi’s melodramatic and manic personality
and alcoholism, as well as the time she dragged Sidda and her siblings
out of the house in the middle of the night and beat them with a
belt. In both texts, after reading the interview, Vivi disowns Sidda. In
the film, Vivi calls Sidda in order to hang up on her, and then sends
her daughter a letter full of cut up photos from Sidda’s childhood.
Sidda retaliates by sending her wedding invitation to her mother
with the date and location cut out. In the novel, Sidda calls Vivi to
try to explain and apologize, but Vivi hangs up on her. It is important
to note that the novel and the film construct the key turning point
in the plot differently: in the novel, Sidda responds to her mother’s
tirade by choosing to spend a few weeks at a cabin outside of Seattle
where she and her fiancé Connor, who is also her scenic director,
are producing a musical version of Clare Boothe Luce’s The Women;
in the film, Vivi’s friends of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Teensy, Caro, and
Necie intervene by kidnapping Sidda and taking her to her child-
hood vacation home on the Louisiana bayou. Novel-Sidda writes to
her mother to ask for help in understanding female friendship in
The Women since she has no female-friendship group like the Ya-Yas;
her mother responds by sending her the Ya-Ya Sisterhood scrapbook.
Film-Sidda is given the scrapbook by the Ya-Yas and is told that read-
ing it and learning about her mother (and why she is the way she is)
are her ticket back to New York, where she has a play opening soon
that is based on her mother’s life. The title of the scrapbook (in both
texts) is, of course, ‘The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood’.
The novel’s device of having Sidda on her own with her dog
means that the present-day narrative largely consists of her internal
thoughts and a few phone calls to her boyfriend or one of the Ya-Yas.
Like Finn, Sidda’s fiancé, Connor, accuses her of being ‘spooked’
when she asks to postpone their wedding, and asks ‘Is it the thing
with your mother?’ Sidda responds that it ‘has nothing whatever
to do with my mother’ (Wells, 11), but of course she spends the
rest of the novel thinking about her mother, trying to understand
her. Her mother’s history and the history of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
is, then, something she pieces together in her mind. In the film
Sidda is played by Sandra Bullock, two years after Miss Congeniality
(Donald Petrie, 2000) established her comedic timing and confirmed
the value of her stardom. In the present, Sidda’s mother is played by
Ellen Burstyn, who also plays Finn’s grandmother in How to Make
an American Quilt. (Both these roles also serve to evoke her New
Hollywood-era roles as a mother in The Exorcist and Alice Doesn’t
Live Here Anymore [Scorsese, 1974]). As a comedy, Divine Secrets of the
Ya-Ya Sisterhood often sees the mother-daughter relationship played
for laughs, signified by Vivi’s temper tantrums and her rage, which is
emphasized in her southern drawl. The ‘Southerness’ of her friends
in the sisterhood adds to the caper-like elements when they seem
like fish-out-of-water at the New York bar where they put a ‘roofie’
in Sidda’s drink in order to kidnap her. While at the cabin, Bullock’s
comic performance in stomping and shouting rivals Burstyn’s.
Deborah Barker is right when she says the film proves that ‘thirteen
years after Steel Magnolias the basic elements of the southern chick
flick are virtually unchanged … its southern setting, uses of nostal-
gia, focus on the lives of the female character, emphasis on female
empowerment through female bonding, and marginalization of the
male characters’ (2008: 107).
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood is also a film with ‘boys on the
side’, and as Tasker argues, like Steel Magnolias ‘the mother/daughter
narrative of suffering and sacrifice is rearticulated by its location
within the film’s other concern: the relations between a group of
women across class and generation’ (Tasker, 1998: 150). Class differ-
ence is not an issue in Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood because
Vivi and her friends all live in large southern houses, drive nice cars,
and seem to have no problem jetting off to New York at the last
minute, and unlike How to Make an American Quilt, African-American
characters are relegated to small roles as servants. Sisterhood in

this film is even more exclusive in its middle-class heterosexual
whiteness.
Authorship, agency and ‘The Feminine Mystique’

The sisterhood does, though, become a group of storytellers for their
captive audience of one; Sidda calls them ‘Mama’s henchmen’ when
they show up at her door. They call their kidnapping ‘a Ya-Ya mission
of mercy’ so that Sidda doesn’t have to spend any more of her life
‘tangled up in anger and resentment’. When she sees the scrapbook,
Caro tells her ‘that all will be revealed pal’ and that ‘there are some
things in there that might make you feel different about Miss Viviane
Joan Abbott Walker … that book minus the chip on your shoulder
are your ticket out of here’. When Sidda finally opens the book, the
first thing she sees is a photo from Vivi’s, Teensie’s, and Caro’s trip to
the premiere of Gone with the Wind. Necie, who was not allowed to go
because Vivi’s black maid was not considered a ‘suitable chaperone’,
reads out the letters that Vivi – ‘a budding journalist’ – sent her. One
of the first things that Sidda learns is that her mother wanted to be a
writer. Earlier in the film she tells the Time magazine interviewer that
Vivi ‘was wounded … by life … She had star quality and she wanted
a life bigger than she was going to find being a cotton-farmer’s
wife with four kids.’ Vivi’s desire for authorship comes to represent
her frustrated agency as a woman coming of age in the 1950s and
1960s. And it highlights the generational difference between her
and Sidda who is a successful author and appears to have all the
postfeminist agency of a woman in the 1990s. If female authorship
can symbolize the search for, and expression of, female agency, then
frustrated female authorship symbolizes failed female independence
and agency. In Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, thwarted female
agency is set in the mid-twentieth century. Like Sophia of How to
Make an American Quilt, Vivi’s story ‘could have come straight out
of The Feminine Mystique’ (Barker, 2008: 108). Vivi becomes only
more metonymic of ‘the problem that has no name’ when Sidda
comes across a photo of a young man in WWII-era military uniform.
Teensie tells her the story of her brother Jack, who was Vivi’s fiancé
and ‘her true love’ as Caro says, ‘the kind you get only once’. He
went to war to impress his conservative and patriotic father, and a
few stories later Sidda finds out that his plane disappeared and they
never found any trace of him. Jack’s death is the reason Vivi marries
his friend Shep Walker, who Sidda believes her mother never loved,
and who the Ya-Yas tell her ‘would rather play second-fiddle than not
play in the band at all’. Jack’s death means that Vivi ends up ‘married
to a cotton farmer with four kids’, but the film also implies that a
further knock-on consequence is the loss of her authorial ambition.
When Jack asks Vivi to be the one he comes back to from the war,
Vivi says, slightly petulantly, ‘What if I’m away being a big-city news-
paper woman?’ Jack replies, ‘You can be anything you set your mind
to.’ As such, the film imbricates female authorship and true love for
Vivi. If she cannot have the latter, then she cannot have the former.
The real politics of women’s access to the workforce that was encour-
aged during the war and then curtailed when the men returned are
displaced onto a personal romantic tragedy.
As storytellers of Vivi’s life and of secrets that Sidda never knew,
the sisterhood do the affective work of rearticulating and explaining
what Sidda understood previously only as ‘that time’ (of the beat-
ings) into the pitiable outcome of this personal romantic tragedy. In
the intimate space of the cabin, their revelations offer Sidda possible
relief of her rage and angst against her mother through including her
in their group knowledge. As Berlant writes:
The gender-marked texts of women’s popular culture cultivate

fantasies of vague belonging as an alleviation of what is hard
to manage in the lived real – social antagoisms, exploitation,
compromised intimacies, the attrition of life (2008: 5).
However, instead of accepting their implied invitation into the sis-

terhood, Sidda calls Connor and tells him to postpone the wedding
because, as she tells him, ‘you don’t want me doing what mamma
did to daddy’. Sidda needs more revelations about her mother before
her own anxiety about becoming just like her is relieved. She is still
afraid that she will ‘beat her kids and run away and then spend
the rest of her life drinking’ like her mother did. But the Ya-Yas are
shocked to realize that this is Sidda’s version of events. What Sidda
needs to know is that a ‘quack doctor’ trying to cure Vivi of alco-
holism put her on experimental drugs. The mix of drug and drink
is what drove her over the edge and sent her to an institution for
‘six months involuntary commitment’, but she has never allowed
her children to know the truth. It is only after Connor visits Vivi
to ask her help that she tells the Ya-Yas that they can reveal all. It is
the possibility of Sidda’s loss of her ‘true love’ that convinces Vivi
that the true story of the night she dragged her children out of the
house and beat them with a belt should be told. When Sidda hears
the truth, Caro asks her to speak, and Sidda says ‘I’m just trying to
figure out how many thousands of dollars on therapy I’ve spent try-
ing to figure out what I’d done.’ They all laugh, including her father,
who has been admonished to ‘write her a check’, and the relief for
everyone is palpable. The intimate public of femininity has done its
work again.
The final scene of the film is in the present at Vivi’s birthday party.
Sidda and her mother are left alone on the porch, and they share
awkward apologies about all their misunderstandings. But the climax
is when Vivi says, ‘all those years of asking God to make me better,
saner, to make all my dreams … I realized I finally got an answer.
You. All I ever wanted to be you do … You came right through me.’
The reconciliation of the mother-daughter relationship also recon-
ciles Vivi to her lost ambitions for authorship. Sidda’s authorship is
her authorship, which is only reinforced by knowledge revealed to
us earlier that the play Sidda has written is about her mother (the
liquor store sign on the set is the liquor store sign in Vivi’s memory
of her breakdown). Sidda’s agency of authorship and the reconcilia-
tion with her mother is only further confirmed when she is officially
inducted into the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. The novel ends with Sidda and
Connor’s wedding, which is held at Vivi and Shep’s house, which
the film keeps as a future event. The privileged relationship in both
is the mother-daughter one but the film heightens this by leaving
the wedding out of the film and making Sidda’s induction into the
Sisterhood its final moment of intimacy. Because she has seen the
‘secret Ya-Ya documents’ she is ‘initiated as a full-fledged intimate
of the secret order’. After pricking the skin of their palms, all five
women hold hands and shout ‘Ya-Ya!’ with the men happily ‘on
the side’ drinking beer on the porch. Though the film’s emphasis
on affective activity is focused on the mother-daughter relationship
(the reconciliation of which is paralleled with the romantic union)
the film’s emphasis on authorship as the connection between Sidda
and Vivi acts as the ‘internal contradiction’ within this mainstream
text. In a film which appears to be all about teaching two women
to be better wives and mothers and daughters, the representation of

female authorship – whether lost or fulfilled – contradicts the con-
ventionality of its image of marriage and family as the happy ending
for women.
Sisterhood, as a metaphor for both female solidarity and inti-
macy that evokes both feminist politics and the affective work of
women’s intimate public, does the additional work, in these adapta-
tions, of making room for female authorship. Female authorship as
the representation of female agency within the film’s texts further
invokes the agency of the actual women who made the film adapta-
tions as directors, writers, producers, and editors. The multiplicity of
them as a sisterhood of authorship includes the woman novelist as
well and the women audience members, many of whom love both
the book and the film. There is, in all this sisterliness, the reduction
of feminist politics to images of relationships amongst women, but
the collaborative nature of their authorial work still stands out in a
film industry perpetually dominated by men in all its spaces behind
the screen, on the screen, and in the audience. That the authorial
sisterhoods in this chapter remain resolutely white makes it clear the
agency of black women filmmakers is an even more acute problem.
4
Postfeminist Austen: By Women,
for Women, about Women
In the ITV television serial Lost in Austen (Dan Zeff, UK, 2008, ITV),
Amanda Price, whose favourite book is Pride and Prejudice (which
she knows so well that ‘the words just say themselves’) finds a door
in her bathroom that opens into the Bennett’s house, allowing
Elizabeth Bennett into the contemporary world and Amanda into
the world of the Bennett sisters, Darcy, and Wickham. It might seem
that the world of Pride and Prejudice has become a magical place like
Narnia, but it is Amanda who is enchanted, as Elizabeth says to her,
‘it is your need that opens the door’. With a healthy dose of post-
modern irony, the serial presents Amanda’s need to escape her life
as great: she deals with difficult customers in her job at a bank; her
mother pressures her to marry her laddish boyfriend who cheated
on her; and she would rather stay in her flat reading her favourite
novel than go out with her friends or meet her boyfriend for a date.
She explains her obsession with Pride and Prejudice to her mother,
declaring ‘I love the manners and the language and the courtesy’.
Amanda’s presence in place of Elizabeth dramatically alters the plot
of the novel and several characters’ destinies. She tries desperately to
be the devoted and knowledgeable reader that she is by attempting
to stem these changes and force events to follow the novel’s narrative
that she knows so well. She cannot, however, keep Darcy from falling
in love with her nor keep herself from falling in love with him, and
after many postmodern twists and turns, in the end, Amanda stays
in that world and takes Elizabeth’s place at Darcy’s side. Amanda,
who feels out of place with the real world, finds a place where she
belongs in Austen’s fictional world. Elizabeth Bennett’s choice in the
113
novel between ‘dismaying her mother or disappointing her father’ is

no longer about marrying Darcy but for Amanda becomes a choice
between staying in the novel’s world or returning to the present. In
an earlier episode, when Amanda has returned to the present to bring
Lizzie back into the ‘novel’ for her injured father, it is Lizzie who
declares, ‘I was born out of time Miss Price. Out of time and out of
place.’ The comment seems lighthearted in the context of ordering a
taxi, as Amanda, who has been in the Pride and Prejudice universe, has
no money, but Lizzie orders the taxi and prepays for it by credit card
via a text message. And yet, the two women are framed as dopple-
gangers of each other. Elizabeth Bennet has modern, short hair, wears
jeans, a brightly coloured t-shirt, and a hoodie, but still speaks in the
familiar syntactical style and cadence of an Austen character from
one of the adaptations. Amanda wears the requisite high-waisted
gown and gloves, but has a twenty-first-century amount of makeup
on and uses a swear word. The visual inverted mirroring and aural
discordant echoing of the two demands a reading of Lizzie’s state-
ment as applicable to them both, that Amanda was also born out of
time and out of place.
Placed alongside Lost in Austen’s fantastical representation of the
contemporary Jane Austen reader and fan, this chapter argues that
the two female-directed adaptations of this chapter – The Jane Austen
Book Club (Swicord, 2007) and Austenland (Hess, 2013) – also repre-
sent the female Austen reader-fan as both set apart and misplaced in
time. The films, though, are both firmly ensconced in the present.
Their heroines must find a compromise between their longing for the
‘manners and the courtesy’ of Austen’s world and living in twenty-
first-century postfeminist society in which the neoliberal rhetoric
of ‘choice and autonomy’ demands that they live up to the post-
feminist ideal of ‘female empowerment’ (Gill, 2009: 99). This chapter
analyses the ideological uses of Austen by postfeminist media cul-
ture to perpetuate postfeminism’s ‘double entanglement’, in which
‘neoconservative values in relation to gender, sexuality, and family
life [coexist] with processes of liberalization in regard to choice and
diversity in domestic, sexual, and kinship relations’ (McRobbie,
2007: 28). I also suggest that the popularity of Austen-related media
narratives might indicate the use of Austen by her fans as a symbol
of a lost feminist identity that signals a discontent with the stric-
tures of postfeminist culture underneath the cover of her association
Postfeminist Austen 115
with romance and ‘spaces where girls can be girls’. Consequently,

this chapter argues that by dramatizing the contemporary readers’
identification with and love for Austen, The Jane Austen Book Club
and Austenland register dissatisfaction with contemporary culture,
thereby making space for the possible exposure of postfeminism’s
double bind – that it both draws on and censors feminist ideol-
ogy. The ambivalence of Austen’s authorial identity as both femi-
nine and feminist, popular and canonical, is key to registering this
complaint. At the end of the chapter, I suggest that Austen offers a
unique opportunity for women filmmakers to borrow her authority
and popularity (if not always successfully in financial terms) in an
industry in which films by women, about women, for women are
still considered a very risky bet.
In May 2005, Carina Chocano’s article in The Los Angeles Times,
‘Fettered by a Faux Stereotype’ noted that the Merriam Webster
Dictionary had added the word ‘chick flick’ to its eleventh edition:
‘a motion picture intended to appeal esp. to women’. The defini-
tion, as she argues, ‘It doesn’t do much, actually, beyond legitimize
the already generally accepted notion that there are movies for
everyone, and then there are movies for women’ (2005). By this
definition, ‘movies for women’ can be any type, genre, or style, from
art cinema to broad comedy, as long as they appeal to women; the
unspoken implication is that the appeal depends on the films also
being about women. The article makes the important point that the
term has always been one of disapprobation and that ‘quality female-
centric movies … assert their quality by denying the female-centric
label’. The article also shows clearly how much easier it is for a chick
flick made by a man to rise above the label: multiple reviews of Curtis
Hanson’s In Her Shoes describe it with variations of ‘this is no mere
chick flick’, and Stephen Daldry rejected the label for The Hours by
saying that there are ‘real serious issues’ in the film. This articula-
tion of the assumptions in and problematic use of the term echo the
assumptions in and problematic use of the term ‘Janeite’ to describe
fans of Jane Austen’s novels, as Deidre Lynch describes:
Janeite works … to highlight the author’s gender and to imply

that the reader’s is the same. The intimacy of the reading situa-
tion the epithet evokes is enhanced by the suggestion that Jane
and the Janeite share their gender and more … confronting the
spectacle of Janeiteism seems motivated by [critics’] suspicion

that the novels provide cultural spaces where girls can all be girls
together. (2000: 14)
Space for ‘girls to be girls together’ in postfeminist media culture

includes, of course, the phenomenon of chick lit and chick flicks.
Like Lynch’s articulation of the implied denigration of the Janeite
(through the critics’ ‘suspicions’) film critics are suspicious of the
girls’ space of chick flicks when it is associated with a film they like.
In his positive review of The Jane Austen Book Club, Roger Ebert
says defensively, ‘You could say that Austen created Chick Lit and
therefore Chick Flicks. You could, but I would not, because I despise
those terms as sexist and ignorant’ (2007). Roger Ebert can protest
all he wants about Jane Austen as the founder of chick lit and chick
flicks but they have much in common in the ways that they have
been gendered and their femininity has been used against them.
Moreover, Austen films fit the dictionary definition of chick flick in
its explicit and implicit meanings: they appeal to women; they are
about women; and they have the added feature of ‘quality’ conferred
by Austen’s literary status. In other words, any film – no matter the
genre, the setting, the plot, the style, the writer or director – that is
about women risks the label and risks being marginalized by critics,
by moviegoers, and, dare I say it, by film scholars. In a review for
In Her Shoes Roger Ebert makes the same point that he makes in the
quote above about the term being an ‘insulting term’, and Chocano
rightly asks, ‘If the term is indeed insulting and meaningless, why
mention it at all?’, and then answers herself:
Why cite a separate standard by which not to judge a movie you

happen to like? Because it has become a compulsory addition to
any discussion about movies about women – and anyone, male or
female, who makes one winds up spending at least some of their
promotional time living the label down. (Chocano, 2005)
But not all chick flicks do try to live the label down, including the
two women directors of the films in this chapter. Robin Swicord who
was a profilic screenwriter (Little Women, Matilda [1996], Memoirs
of a Geisha [2005]) before getting her first chance to direct, which
she had been seeking for some time, as well as to write recognizes
what I suggest above, ‘I think that anytime a woman makes a movie

with a female protagonist, you run the risk of having people call it a
chick flick. It’s just a way of marginalizing women … I didn’t worry
too much about whether it would be labeled one thing or another’
(Lyden, 2007). Even more emphatically, in a HuffPost Live interview,
Jerusha Hess says about Austenland, ‘It’s obviously a movie for girls.
I’m not hiding that’ (Camilleri, 2013). Hess more than once declares
that, she has made a ‘girly’ film covered in ‘pink and frills’ and that
she does not see that as a problem.1 Nor does Stephanie Meyers the
writer of the Twilight novels, who produced Austenland and sat next to
Hess at the interview, batting away the interviewer’s questions about
the heteronormativity of the film.2 However, the biggest furore the
film created was over the fact that advance screenings and premieres
were women-only events. Co-president of Sony Pictures Classic, who
distributed the film, told the Hollywood Reporter that at Sundance,
‘women loved the movie, but we found that the few reviews that we
did get from male critics were vicious … We just said, “Fine, it’s not
for you. Don’t see it. Can’t come”’ (Siegel, 2013). Though the strategy
turned out to be not very effective (the film’s box-office receipts only
just exceeded its cost), the attempt clearly sought to capitalize on the
appeal of a space ‘where girls can be girls together’, and ever since
Bridget Jones ogled over Darcy and Elizabeth getting it on, Austen
has regularly authorized that space in postfeminist media culture.
(Post)Feminist Austen
Though it began with the Austen boom of the 1990s that I discuss
in Chapter 1, the trend in Austen adaptations and Austen-related
adaptations continues but with a twenty-first century alteration:
many of the Austen films since 2000 are set in the present. Clueless
(Heckerling, 1995) is an obvious precursor to this trend, but since
Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), there have been a range of ‘updated
Austen’ films, from Pride and Prejudice (Black, 2003) set in a Mormon
university to Scents and Sensibility (Brough, 2011) about sisters who
start a beauty business after their parents are bankrupt. Several of
these updated versions have been made by women directors, as
Clueless and Bridget Jones’s Diary were: Bridget Jones’s Diary: the Edge of
Reason (Kidron, 2004); Bride and Prejudice (Chada, 2004); Aisha (Ojha,
2010), which is based on Emma; A Modern Pride and Prejudice (Mae,
2011); and the two Austen-related films I consider in this chapter,

The Jane Austen Book Club (Swicord, 2007) and Austenland (Hess,
2013). Like the Bridget Jones novels, both the films in this chapter
are based on contemporary novels; The Jane Austen Book Club by
Karen Jay Fowler and Austenland by Shannon Hale. Both of these
novels are part of a contemporary trend for appropriations of Jane
Austen’s novels and Austen as a character in contemporary fiction.
Examples range from Stephanie Barron’s Jane Austen Mysteries to the
contemporized Northanger Abbey by Val McDermid. All these texts
are central to the contemporary, popular Austen industry, and the
films in particular are a significant franchise of contemporary, post-
feminist media culture. In postfeminist media texts of the 1990s and
2000s, ‘representational verisimilitude require[s] an acknowledgment
of feminism as a feature of the cultural milieu’ while the texts also
‘offer the pleasure and comfort of (re)claiming an identity uncom-
plicated by gender politics, postmodernism, or institutional critique’,
thereby implying that feminism has been ‘taken into account’ but
that it is also a ‘spent force’ (Tasker and Negra, 2005: 107; Negra,
2008: 2; McRobbie, 2007: 28). For women, the ‘(re)claimed’ iden-
tity emphasizes (neo) traditional versions of romance, heterosexual
coupling, femininity, and domesticity. The parenthetical ‘re’ points
to the complicated relationship between the past and the present
that structures postfeminist discourses and politics, in which varying
forms of female identity are claimed and reclaimed in order to dis-
claim (an almost always extreme stereotype of) feminism.
In the context of this chapter, it is also suggestive of the recurring
academic debates about Austen and feminism in which Austen’s
feminism and a feminist Austen are claimed, disclaimed, and
reclaimed.3 These debates suggest that Austen’s authorship, like the
women author figures throughout this book, functions as a represen-
tation of female agency but is constructed ambivalently in relation
to feminism. In her introduction to Jane Austen and Discourses of
Feminism, published in 1995, Devoney Looser suggests that ‘[i]n the
greater scheme of things, whether this generation or the next deems
Austen a feminist matters most to only a few lives – those of profes-
sional academics and of other interested readers’ (Looser, 1995: 7).
It is not as easy to make this claim today because, as I argue below,
knowledge of the feminist literary studies appropriation of Austen
is part of what fuels her popularity outside academia, evidenced by
these various media texts. Still, Looser asks a few questions about our
understanding of Austen’s relationship to feminism that seem even
more relevant and pressing now:
The ways in which ‘we’ define feminism – both historically and

in our own time – are crucially important not just to a handful of
academics but lives more generally. How will feminism be repre-
sented to and/or taken up by subsequent generations? How will
we understand the debate and the struggles in which Austen’s
texts participated? Will we continue to read Austen at all, and if
so, what might we gain or lose in the process? (1995: 10)
In the context of the current ubiquity of Austen in popular culture,

these questions about feminism must be reconsidered in light of the
critiques of postfeminism. What is it, then, about Austen, and her
novels, that is so adaptable in postfeminist media culture? This is the
question I try to answer below by looking at two films that are about
the Austen reader, especially the woman Austen reader, because they
explicitly try to show what the appeal is for Austen fans, both as
readers of her novels and viewers of the adaptations.
Looser’s Jane Austen and the Discourses of Feminism appeared in
the same year as the boom in Austen adaptations, which I discussed
in Chapter 1. Since then, many of her questions about feminism
and Austen have been asked in relation to this media phenom-
enon in such articles as Looser’s own ‘Feminist Implications of the
Silver Screen Austen’, Martine Voiret’s ‘Books to Movies: Gender
and Desire in Jane Austen’s Adaptations’, Penny Gay’s ‘Sense and
Sensibility in a Postfeminist World: Sisterhood Is Still Powerful’, and
several others in anthologies and journals. Some are critical, such
as Deborah Kaplan’s ‘Mass Marketing Jane Austen: Men, Women
and Courtship in Two Film Adaptations’, in which she argues that
most of the recent screen versions have been ‘harlequinized’ so
that the romantic conclusion overpowers any gestures toward femi-
nist critique (1998). Some are much more positive, such as Elzette
Steenkamp who declares, ‘it should also be said that the majority of
Austen adaptations constitute feminist readings of the original texts’
(2009: 4). In ‘Feminist Implications’, Looser herself takes the adapta-
tions as the opportunity to argue against all those critics who only
see nostalgia for an idealized past in the popularity of Austen and to
claim instead ‘that Austen’s reemergence demonstrates progressive,

feminist elements at work in popular culture, rather than simply
tolling neoconservative bells’ (1998: 159). That feminist scholars of
film and media have been demonstrating feminist elements at work
in popular culture since the early 1980s does not register in Looser’s
piece. Published in 1998, it also precedes the growth in feminist
film, media, and cultural studies scholarship that critiques the post-
feminist discourses in popular culture outlined above. My analysis
here is sympathetic to Looser’s claim, but is much more circumspect,
dissecting the ambivalent relationship between popular culture and
feminism.
More recently, Vivien Jones, in her article ‘Post-Feminist Austen’,
has put to use the film, media, and cultural studies critics of post-
feminism (such as Modleski, McRobbie, and Negra) to ask ‘why chick
lit needs Austen at all’ (2011: 71). She argues that the postfeminist
culture of chick lit and Austen’s own historical moment share a ‘struc-
ture of feeling’ and that ‘the period of the Napoleonic wars, with its
loyalist panics and attacks on the “unsex’d females” who defended
women’s rights in the 1790s’ broadly fits Susan Faludi’s claim, in her
book Backlash: The Undeclared War on Women, that a backlash against
feminist advances for women is an ongoing historical occurrence
( Jones, 2011: 74). Following McRobbie, Jones sees postfeminism as
more complex than backlash and argues that ‘in its “taking into
accountness” form [postfeminism] is … a more useful way of thinking
about the way Austen turns the female novel to powerful conserva-
tive effect’ (2011: 74). She concludes that a close look at postfeminist
chick lit’s use of Austen forces us to reconsider ‘the still strong critical
desire to appropriate her unproblematically for feminism’ (2011: 79).
For Jones, chick lit’s obsession with Austen weakens the case for read-
ing Austen as feminist because postfeminist chick lit is conservative:
Chick lit represents feminist gains in the coercive form of good

jobs, sexual freedom, and – importantly – the right to be funny.
But the personal choices it really cares about, its love plots and its
style statements, its delighted recovery of girliness, of femininity,
define it as essentially conservative. (2011: 73)
She makes her case by comparing the ways postfeminist chick lit
takes feminism into account with the way she sees Austen taking
Enlightenment feminism into account.4 A notable example is her

comparison of how ‘post-feminism returns the feminist insight, “the
personal is political”, back to the personal’ with Elizabeth Bennet’s
declaration that she is a ‘rational creature’ but only ‘to impress on
Mr. Collins the hopelessness of his proposal’ (2011: 76). By estab-
lishing chick lit’s essential conservatism and then ‘reading back to
Austen’, Jones makes the case that Austen is so popular in postfemi-
nist culture because they share an essential conservatism and then
declares Austen’s popularity in postfeminist culture as evidence of
Austen’s essential conservatism. Jones is clearly making a polemical
point here, but her argument is limited by her polemics because she
ignores the historical specificities of contemporary postfeminism,
particularly its relationship with feminism of the 1970s and 1980s
and the ways that postfeminist media expect audience knowledge of
feminist theory/criticism while simultaneously expecting audience
members to refuse any identification with it.
‘This is my one chance to really live in Austen’s world!’
McRobbie articulates this postfeminist ‘double entanglement’ in

media culture through an analysis of the ubiquitous Wonderbra
ads of the mid-1990s that showcased the supermodel Eva Herzigova
‘looking down admiringly at her cleavage’:
The composition of the image had such a textbook ‘sexist ad’

dimension (the ‘male gaze’ is invited and encouraged by the gaze
of the model herself to look towards her breasts) that one could
be forgiven for supposing some ironic familiarity with both cul-
tural studies and with feminist critiques of advertising … Indeed,
it almost offers (albeit crudely) the viewer or passing driver Laura
Mulvey’s theory of women as objects of the gaze. (2009: 16–17)
She goes on to suggest that the ad, and others like it, evoke ‘the
shadow of disapproval … [which] is only instantly to be dismissed
as belonging to the past, to a time when feminism used to object to
such imagery … To make such an objection nowadays, would run
the risk of ridicule’ (2009: 17). In its knowingness and irony, the
ad offers insider status (i.e. sophisticated intelligent understanding
of and a sense of humour about our mediated world) to those who
get the joke and imposes outsider status on those who critique the
joke. Postfeminism has created a kind of contract with women, as
McRobbie makes clear: ‘To count as a girl today appears to require
[a] kind of ritualistic denunciation [of feminism]… the new female
subject is, despite her freedom, called upon to be silent, to with-
hold critique [of sexism] … Indeed, this withholding of critique is a
condition of her freedom’ (2009: 18). Many critics of postfeminism
have referred to the common conversational trope of beginning
a comment with ‘I’m not a feminist but …’ as a way of assert-
ing a feminist stance while discounting any identification with
the movement (which has for some time in popular culture been
stereotyped as irrationally radical, angry, anti-men and anti-sex), a
dis-identification that evidences the power of postfeminist gender
politics to silence feminism. And yet, it is a silence that is broken
by the subsequent claim – that women deserve equal pay, that
women are never at fault for rape, that women should not have to
choose between motherhood and career – which is still made. This
simultaneous dis-identification with feminism while identifying
with feminist stances is emblematic of the pressures on women to
conform to postfeminism’s duplicitousness.
McRobbie argues that this silence deprives women ‘of the possibili-
ties of feminist sociality’, and she suggests that ‘the extent to which
young women are perhaps driven mad by the situation within which
they now find themselves’ is perhaps not so surprising. She makes
a case for reading the current prevalence of anorexia and self-harm
amongst young women as a kind of ‘illegible rage’ against the loss
of a public feminism and suggests that these practices are ‘some
trace or residue of that lost feminist rebellion’ (2009: 117). And
then, in a slightly off-hand way, she links her thorough theoretical
analysis of this ‘illegible rage’ to the continued and relatively popular
consumption of ‘feminist classic novels’, arguing that:
therefore the young woman prefers to keep her feminism a private

matter, something personal, something internalised. Feminism
is a private concern, a kind of secret life, a devouring of classic
feminist novels, for example, a love for Jane Austen, a passion
for Emma Bovary. If the ‘violence of social regulation’ gives rise
to impossible demands while also foreclosing on a form of power
which might challenge these punitive norms of social approval,
the young woman’s illegible rage expresses her powerlessness in

the forced abandonment of this public feminist ideal. (2009: 119)
McRobbie’s suggestion of an expression of female ‘illegible rage’

through a private, even secret, love of Austen and her ‘classic femi-
nist novels’ relies on the knowledge of the very public investment
by feminist literary critics in re-presenting Austen to the wider public
as a feminist (either as an Enlightenment feminist or through politi-
cized rereadings) in order to override the common public perception
of her as the very feminine ‘Aunt Jane’ who wrote on slips of ivory.
In ‘Gender and the Heritage Genre’, Dobie argues that ‘Austen’s
novels have been recognized as a fertile terrain for socially-conscious
representations of women’s lives – a perception undoubtedly nur-
tured by the proliferation of politicized readings of Austen in the
Academy’ (Dobie, 2003: 248, 251). In her attempt to refute feminist
readings of Austen, Jones conveniently ignores that those feminist
readings have taken on a life of their own beyond the academy. No
matter the academic debates since, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s
argument that women authors of the nineteenth century (including
Austen) wrote in defiance of patriarchal injunctions that writing
was not women’s work and that by implication nineteenth-century
women writers were at least proto-feminists, structures popular
understandings and representations of those authors and their
works. Furthermore, I would suggest that popular culture’s particu-
lar obsession with Austen is in part founded on a ‘common sense’
understanding of Margaret Kirkham’s claim that ‘Jane Austen is the
first major woman novelist in English’ (1983: xi). Austen appeals to
postfeminist media because she was ‘the first’, making her a ‘ground-
breaker’ and a kind of rebel, and also ‘major’, meaning her novels
were popular and pleased the majority. Therefore, what were radical
appropriations of her at the time have been co-opted and commodi-
fied by postfeminism so that Austen invokes a disingenuous insist-
ence that women can do whatever they want while still pleasing
everyone. In other words, if Austen could be successful then, any
woman today can be successful now.
Of all McRobbie’s private acts of rebellion, though, being a reader,
or even a fan, of Austen spills over into the public realm through the
popular film and television adaptations of her novels. As I said above,
my argument is that the popular appeal of the Austen adaptations
is due in part to the space they offer for a somewhat more public
registration of discontent with the constraints of postfeminist cul-
ture. They do this by making the private act of ‘devouring classic
feminist novels’ more public, not so much through the individual
woman reader’s act of going to the cinema, because, of course, she
can also watch the film in the privacy of her home, but through
the financial successes of these films, to which both theater and
home viewing contribute, and the widespread knowledge of those
successes that result in further Austen screen narratives, as well as
public discussions about their popularity in the media. Furthermore,
some of the most successful film adaptations of Austen are heritage
pictures that, with their fetishization of costumes, English manor
houses and countryside, fulfill audience expectations of ‘effortless
transport into the world of 19th-century fiction’ (Sklar, 1997: B7). As
such, I am arguing that Austen’s appeal for postfeminism in the ‘faith-
ful’ heritage-film adaptations is the opportunity she and her novels
offer to present this mix of feminism and the feminine in a more
‘natural’ setting of an historical moment long before the ‘second
wave’ of twentieth-century feminism and in a time when personal
and individual gestures toward female independence were infinitely
more risky and fraught and, therefore, potentially more radical.
By focusing on the contemporary woman reader, The Jane Austen
Book Club and Austenland make visible Austen’s central value to post-
feminist media culture: the opportunity to identify with and imagine
oneself in another time. In relation to such time-travel films as 13
Going on 30 (Winick, 2004) and Kate and Leopold (Mangold 2001)
Diane Negra ‘speculates’ that ‘postfeminist texts so often obsess
about the temporal because they half suspect postfeminism’s own
historical misplacedness, that is they recognize at some level the pre-
mature and deceptive nature of any conceptual system that declares
feminism obsolete’ (Negra, 2008: 85). If part of the appeal of many
heritage adaptations is the experience of feeling transported to the
nineteenth century, they are also time-travel narratives, through their
reception but also through their textual representation of postfemi-
nist discourses in a pre-feminist historical setting.5 They exhibit the
‘historical misplacedness’ to which Negra alludes and point to the
deceptive nature of postfeminism’s declaration that feminism is dead.
This deception seems, to me, all the more exposed in the Austen
adaptations because of the widespread knowledge of feminist literary
criticism’s positioning of her and her novels at the head of the femi-
nist literary canon. By narrativizing the reception of Austen’s novels
and the adaptations through the figure of the woman reader-spectator,
The Jane Austen Book Club and Austenland make explicit the appeal, as
well as the limitations of, Austen to signify rebellion against the mad-
ness induced by ‘the situation in which women now find themselves’.
Austen as the antidote to contemporary life
In The Jane Austen Book Club, one plot climax (one of several in this
ensemble film) occurs when Prudie, a high school French teacher, is
about to cross the street to meet a male student for a sexual tryst in
a motel. As she looks up to see the signal change from the red DONT
WALK to the green WALK, the boy arrives on his motorcycle. They
give each other a small wave and then Prudie glances at the signal
again, which is framed in a medium shot. Instead of flashing WALK,
the signal flashes the words, one after the other, WHAT – WOULD –
JANE – DO, twice, and then, in a sudden close-up, repeatedly flashes
in red, DONT WALK. The result of this surreal moment in a gener-
ally straightforward romantic comedy is that Prudie abandons the
idea of having an affair and reconciles with her husband by reading
Persuasion (the novel the book club was meant to discuss that day)
aloud with him. After Prudie’s encounter with the cross-walk signal,
all the other destined heterosexual couplings come together in the
next five minutes of film time: characters make Austenesque moves,
such as reading aloud, reading recommended books, and writing
confessional love letters, to reconnect with the one they truly love.
On a meta-level, the crossing signal functions as a symbol of the
popular understanding of Austen as a romance novelist: that she and
her novels can act as some kind of life guide in finding true love, evi-
denced by the advice books on the subject that invoke her name.6 In
terms of narrative, though, the signal is a projection of Prudie’s mind,
which suggests less that it signifies something about Austen than
that it signifies a mystical nature or otherworldliness about being a
reader of Austen, that there is something special about Austen read-
ers, something that sets them apart from the contemporary world (a
distinction reinforced by the postmodern, ironic play on the once-
trendy Christian bracelet imprinted with the letters WWJD – What
Would Jesus Do).
The above magical catalyst for the film’s romantic happy endings
is the culmination of how the film establishes reading Austen as the
corrective to the burdens of modern life. As Bernadette, the unofficial
leader of the group says, ‘All Jane Austen, all the time. It’s the per-
fect antidote … to life!’ And the film establishes Austen’s authority
over the contemporary setting from the very beginning: before any
credits, we see the Jane Austen quote ‘Is not general incivility the
very essence of love?’ on a black screen accompanied by an audio
track of the noises of modern life: phones ringing, radio phone-ins,
traffic, car horns, the incomprehensible chatter of conversation lay-
ered over conversation. The title of the film appears and then the
film cuts to an aerial shot of a freeway interchange, the first image
of an extended montage sequence of the images and experiences of
‘modern life’ that mostly involve the frustrations of dealing with
technology while trying to work, commute, stay fit, and shop. The
widespread hectic pace of contemporary life is signalled by a series
of people talking on their mobile phones while doing something else
at the same time, such as walking a dog, drinking coffee, or most
ubiquitously, using a laptop. Later sequences show mobile phone
users unable to get a reception or talking loudly, disturbing those
near them. Cars and money are central with short scenes showing a
parking space in a crowded lot being stolen by an SUV from a wait-
ing car and another in which a man spills his Starbucks coffee down
his front after traffic forces him to stop abruptly, as well as multiple
scenes of non-working cash machines, vending machines, and credit
cards. Trying to keep healthy in the midst of this busy life is also
a strong theme as characters fall off treadmills going too fast and
struggle to find space in a yoga class.
The opening montage functions to elicit spectator confirmation
that contemporary leisure time, working life, and consumer culture
is a kind of tyranny of choices, in which the middle and upper-
middle classes must regularly battle the consequences of the conveni-
ences and successes of late capitalism, while those conveniences and
successes remain the symbols of contemporary freedom, choice, and
success, for which they must perpetually work hard to maintain. This
neoliberal tyranny of choice also extends into one’s personal life. The
first narrative scene of The Jane Austen Book Club gives an indication
of this for some of its main characters. Several of the soon-to-be
book club members are at a funeral, for the favoured dog of Jocelyn,
trainer of show-quality Ridgebacks and a single woman who appears

to love her dogs like she would if they were children. Her emotional-
ism over her pet’s death is coded as excessive and misplaced by her
actions (holding the funeral in the first place, kissing the coffin at the
graveside, weeping in her friend’s arms in front of all the guests and
drinking spirits to calm her nerves when back in her home with her
friends), which is then confirmed by a conversation between Sylvia
and her husband Daniel. Sylvia tries to keep Daniel from leaving
early to ‘go to work’, as he claims, by reminding him that Jocelyn
was at every one of their daughter’s birthday parties. He responds
incredulously saying, ‘Allegra is our actual child. Let’s get some
perspective here. Do you think if Jocelyn were married with kids
she be giving her dog a state funeral? This whole thing is warped.’
By pathologizing Jocelyn’s choice in terms of traditional roles for
women he speaks of the ‘postfeminist family values paradigms [that]
sort femininity into categories of value and abjection’ (Negra, 2008:
44). His daughter, who is a lesbian, hears this conversation and
responds strongly, saying that she is ‘personally offended’ and uses
herself as an example of a woman who may never have her own
nuclear family, even if ‘some gay women get some version of that.’
Daniel tries to conclude the conversation by asking, ‘can we at least
agree that human beings need human connection … companionship,
conversation … sex?’ Allegra maintains a serious tone and responds,
‘you get those things from Mom; Jocelyn gets them from her dogs.’
There is a brief pause before they both laugh at the inadvertent joke.
My main point here, though, is that Allegra’s response to her father
shows some resistance to the tyranny of choice in Jocelyn’s case,
which means she can choose to be single and invest emotionally in
animals but that this choice has its social consequences. The example
of her own life confronts the tyranny more strongly since as a les-
bian she could choose to have a partner and kids, but such a choice
so obviously transgresses the ideal of ‘natural’ nuclear family pro-
creation. This postfeminist tyranny over Jocelyn and Allegra’s sexual
choices reflects the socio-political state of affairs in which there has
been, as McRobbie argues:
both a liberalization on the part of the state through the grant-

ing of specific family and kinship rights and entitlements to gays
and lesbians, and also a neo-liberalisation in the same terrain of
sexuality, with a more punitive response being shown to those

who live outside the economic unit of the two parent family.
(McRobbie, 2009: 7)
The book club comes into existence as a response to various

female characters’ melancholia and dissatisfaction brought on by
the impossible idealization of marriage and the nuclear family in
postfeminist culture. The idea of the book club is mooted as a way
of ‘keeping Jocelyn from brooding’ over her dogs. It is decided upon
after Daniel’s affair and request for a divorce when Sylvia’s new state
of unhappy singleness cements the need for female community
outside the nuclear family. The idea to focus on the female-friendly
Austen comes into being when Bernadette (the eldest woman of the
group) meets Prudie, a young high school teacher of French, while
waiting in line for an Austen film fest. Prudie unwittingly reveals to
all those in line that she has just come from an argument with her
husband, and Bernadette quickly and maternally puts her arm around
the young woman and ushers her away to have ice cream and a chat.
Bernadette says that the club should be all women because men
‘pontificate’ and ‘never let you get a word in edgewise … women
don’t butt in, but men monologue…. on and on, yammer, yammer,
yammer; and we listen to them, trying to protect their feelings.’ In
typical postfeminist fashion Bernadette’s monologue here is ironic
as she ‘yammers’ on and Prudie cannot get a word in ‘edgewise’, the
suggestion being that such outmoded gender stereotypes are just
a joke and that only an older woman like Bernadette without any
self-consciousness would ever voice them. And yet, not unlike the
adaptations in Chapter 3, the film presents the book club as an ideal-
ized and postfeminist image of ‘sisterhood’ as an act of resistance
to the postfeminist valorizing of the traditional family as women’s
best source of community. The implication that this group is a
‘sisterhood’ that evokes both the feminist and feminine connota-
tions that I articulated in Chapter 3 depends on their choice to read
Austen. Bernadette assumes, if not knows, that an all-female group
will have already all read all of Austen; consequently she provides
‘space where girls can be girls together’, which Deidre Lynch has
shown is the both exclusive and marginalized space of the Janeite
(2000: 14). Even after Grigg, a young tech-industry worker, joins
the group as its ‘token’ male, the club remains a place of feminine
authority through knowledge of Austen’s novels, which he does

not have. Having never read any of her novels, he buys the col-
lected works of Austen bound in a single book and confesses that he
thought they might all be sequels, which is greeted with much eye
rolling on the part of the women. His lack of knowledge regularly
puts him on the outside of the women’s communal expression of
emotion and feeling when they express strong feelings of attach-
ment or frustration with Austen’s various female characters. While
discussing Mansfield Park, Prudie says, ‘If this were high school, we
all know that Elizabeth Bennett would be most popular and Fanny
would be least’, to which Grigg innocently asks, ‘Who is Elizabeth
Bennett?’, inciting another round of eye rolls from the women. As
a place where Grigg often functions as a recipient of the female
members’ superior knowledge about the subject at hand and their
frustration with ‘men’ who are able to walk through life not worried
about love and intimacy, the group functions as a place to express
their postfeminist ‘illegible rage’.
Romantic desire and postfeminist subjectivity
In Austenland, a brief sequence of scenes early on show the protago-

nist Jane Hayes in various moments of her post-adolescent years as
the fan so immersed in the ‘world’ of Austen, that she does not act in
the ways expected of a young woman growing up at the turn of the
millennium. First, Jane is a young teenage girl with long braids and
braces, sitting in ‘The Regency’ diner, wearing a high-collared shirt
and pinafore with a busy Victorian flower pattern; she is drinking
out of her own china tea cup. Her best friend Molly is appalled when
Jane seems flattered by the gangly waiter’s attentions. At college,
a male student wearing a hoodie and baggy jeans passes Jane and
Molly, and Molly says ‘Oh … saggy’, expressing both girls’ chagrin at
the style of the boys around them (and a nod to Cher’s assessment
of the boys of her generation in Clueless). Molly raises her hand to
give Jane a fist bump and Jane awkwardly reciprocates, unsure of
how to perform the exaggerated hand explosion. After they separate,
Jane opens the door to her class – English 212: Jane Austen. She
smiles and there is a perceptible relaxing of her shoulders. Then a
screen wipe from right to left reveals the image of Colin Firth as
Mr Darcy wet from his infamous dive into the pond and walking
toward Pemberley. Jane is watching the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice with
a date who has his arm around her and is kissing her neck. When she
stops him exclaiming, ‘This is the best part!’, he gets up in frustra-
tion and on his way out punches the life size posterboard of Firth as
Darcy that the Jane keeps near her door.7 After Jane restores its head,
which has broken at the neck, she kisses it gently. Finally, we meet
Jane in the present, a 30-something woman working at her cubicle.
In the novel, Jane is a not very busy graphic designer; in the film,
the drawings on the walls of her cubicle and the heart on her desk
that she is making out of paperclips signify this underemployment.
When a frumpy but verbally aggressive ex-boyfriend appears, saying
‘I’m as good as it gets’, Jane grabs her brochure for Austenland – an
immersive Austen ‘experience’ in England where every woman’s visit
ends in a ball and an engagement – and runs.
Jane, as she tells Molly who is trying to stop her from going, is
Austen’s ‘biggest fan’. Played by Keri Russell who was made famous
by her television role as the eponymous Felicity, Jane’s character ref-
erences Felicity’s intelligence, earnestness, and naivety. She does not
receive any magical messages from the author; she is a ‘nerd’ in the
fandom sense that she is extremely knowledgeable about Austen, the
novels, the Regency period, and is a collector of Austen parapherna-
lia. Jane is a feminine version of the boy nerd of Hess’ previous film
that she co-wrote with her husband, Jared – Napoleon Dynamite (Hess,
2004). She is a nerd in part because she wears her fandom on her
sleeve. Throughout each of the scenes above, Jane has a bag with her
or a sticker on her folder or her computer that says ‘I love (symbol-
ized by a pink heart) Mr Darcy’. At the same time as being an Austen
‘nerd’, Jane’s obsession with Darcy means that she fulfils the image of
the female romance reader who is emotionally over-invested in the
characters and the happy ending, clearly on the verge of a dangerous
lack of self-control, apparently indulging in, what Q.D. Leavis might
describe as, ‘a habit of fantasying [that] will lead to maladjustment
in actual life’ (Leavis, 1978: 152). And yet, Jane is also a model post-
feminist citizen. She has a job; she makes enough money to have
her own apartment; she participates in the economy by spending
that money; and we know that she has even set money aside: Molly
is appalled that she is going to spend her whole life savings on the
trip to Austenland. Jane, it is made clear, has a respectable, middle
class, knowledge-sector job; she is not a student, nor on welfare, nor
an ambitious career woman, nor a stay-at-home mother. Jane is a

successful recipient of, what McRobbie describes as,
a new sexual contract currently being made available to young

women, particularly in the West, to come forward and make good
use of the opportunity to work, to gain qualifications, to control
fertility and to earn enough money to participate in the consumer
culture which in turn will become a defining feature of contempo-
rary modes of feminine citizenship. (McRobbie, 2011: 54)
Jane, much like Amanda Price of Lost in Austen, embodies the oppor-
tunities and ‘wealth’ made possible for women by late capitalism,
in which a condition of her inclusion in work and the attendant
independence this brings is the responsibility to spend her money
on the appropriate goods. She is neither central to the system nor
a challenge to that system. She is, though, clearly dissatisfied. The
disconnection between her apparent successful independence and
her intimations of a restlessness within embody postfeminist melan-
cholia, a state brought on by the successes of late capitalism in which
‘young women have made some advances, [and] they seem perhaps
not to have much to complain of, some might even see them as
“having it all”’; however, in the midst of this apparently progres-
sive state of affairs there remains, ‘some trace or residue of that lost
feminist rebellion’ (McRobbie, 2011: 117).
What I want to suggest is that Jane’s obsession with Austen and,
more to the point, Darcy is her ‘rebellion’. Her bedroom is full of
signifiers of her obsession: china teacups, framed silhouettes, a doll-
house that looks like something out of an Austen film, a pillow with
a Darcy figure embroidered on it and a sign above her bed that says
DARCY WAS HERE. Though the flowery decoration is more ‘English
B&B Victorian twee’ than nostalgic Regency, it effects the characteri-
zation of Jane as a woman uncomfortable with modernity. With the
dollhouse, several dolls and the sign over her bed, it also marks Jane
as a woman who is stuck in adolescence and virginal. As postfeminist
culture develops into the second decade of the twenty-first century,
it is becoming increasingly clear that ‘sexual subjectification’, as
Rosalind Gill calls it, has become the main route to postfeminist
citizenship. Through analysis of contemporary ‘midriff advertising’,
Gill explains how women in adverts are no longer positioned as
‘passive sexual objects’ but that they are now ‘empowered, hetero-
sexually desiring subjects’ (2009: 99). The Wonderbra advertisement
described above by McRobbie is a prime example. This kind of adver-
tising constructs the postfeminist subject as ‘a young, heterosexual
woman who knowingly and deliberately plays with her sexual power
and is forever “up for it”’ (Gill, 2009: 98). Consequently, ‘Not only
are women objectified as they were before, but through sexual sub-
jectification they must also now understand their own objectification as
pleasurable and self-chosen’ (107, emphasis in the original).
Jane Hayes, however, is a young woman who is not up for it. The
temptation would be to describe her as a prude, a woman who has
simply sublimated her sexual desire in her obsession with romance.
But Jane’s history with men in the sequence described above por-
trays male desire for, and objectification of, Jane constructing their
relations. The date on the couch is upset that Jane is not up for sex
when he wants it, and the ex-boyfriend who comes to her office
says, ‘I picked you on purpose Jane Hayes. Thirty-plus, clock-ticking’,
suggesting that if she has not been able to use her sexual power to
get what she wants by now, then it is unlikely to happen. (She is
also attractive to him in part because he assumes that she will be up
for sex because her biological clock is ticking.) As Gill makes clear,
postfeminist sexual subjectification leaves out older women, fat
women, lesbians and unattractive women and notes that the fear of
becoming the older, and therefore unattractive, woman who is no
longer empowered by her sexual attractiveness to men is constantly
hanging as a threat over the postfeminist woman under this regime
of sexual subjectification. Jane’s desire for Darcy, her desire to live
in Austen’s world, to get away from the male gaze and the demand
that she use her sexual appeal to be empowered, these are the acts of
Jane’s ‘feminist rebellion’ against postfeminist ‘empowerment’.
The limits of Austen(land)
In terms of the broad, nearly slapstick, comedy of Austenland, Jane’s

desires are made part of the joke. At the travel agent’s office, he
shows her a photo of a ‘staff-member’: an attractive shirtless man,
wearing breeches and a powdered wig, who ‘is a vegan; enjoys
nightly dips in the pond and has a pony named Sparkles Pancake’.
It is at the travel agent’s that we discover that Jane is spending her
‘entire life savings’ on her trip to Austenland. At Heathrow, Jane

meets Miss Elizabeth ‘Charming’ (played by Jennifer Coolidge), and
upon their arrival at the gatehouse the proprietress Mrs Wattlesbrook
(played by Jane Seymour) tells Jane that she will be ‘Miss Erstwhile’.
The pseudonym reflects the fact that Jane’s life savings only covered
the cost of the bottom line ‘copper package’, while Miss Charming
has the all-inclusive ‘platinum package’. At that moment, Jane is
‘just so happy to be here’, but then the carriage arrives to take them
to the grand house, and Jane, as the poorer guest, must sit outside
on the back with her trunk in her lap, while Miss Charming sits
inside with Mrs Wattlesbrook. When she receives her clothing, her
dresses are brown and plain, while Miss Charming’s are colourful
combinations of velvet and silk. Jane’s hair is done up in a relatively
plain style with very tight curls at her temple and a tight chignon
at the back, and she is housed in the servants’ quarters. This scene
highlights the ways that postfeminist media culture’s obsession with
Jane Austen often glosses over the financial dependence of women
in the eighteenth century. In the postfeminist fantasy of Austen’s
world, every woman imagines that she is Elizabeth Bennett who
will be married to the wealthy Mr Darcy. When Jane is introduced
to the rest of the company in the house, including Mr Nobley (her
love interest), Colonel Andrews (Miss Charming’s love interest) and
Miss Heartwright (the competition), Mrs Wattlesbrook says, ‘Miss
Erstwhile: an orphan of no fortune whom we’ve taken in out of the
goodness of our hearts’. Jane’s face falls: she is not Elizabeth Bennett;
she is Fanny Price. In its representation of neoliberal female empow-
erment (which requires both employment and sexual subjectifica-
tion), postfeminism elides the structural inequalities of class, race,
and sexuality. By trying to make a joke of the prejudices of Austen’s
era, Austenland inadvertently exposes the prejudices of postfemi-
nism. We can see this clearly in the television series Lost in Austen,
with which I began this chapter.
While Amanda is trying to keep the plot of Pride and Prejudice
together, Elizabeth Bennet has taken her place in the present and got
a job as a nanny with Pirhana’s (Amanda’s flatmate) help. Amanda
manages to get back to the present in an attempt to bring Elizabeth to
her father’s aid after Mr Bennet has been hurt. Darcy has followed her
because he regrets his retraction of his marriage proposal after discov-
ering that she is not a ‘maiden’ and is still in love with her. Amanda
takes Darcy to find Elizabeth, who proves to Darcy that they are
meant to be married by googling Colin Firth as Mr Darcy. Along the
way they pick up Amanda’s ex-boyfriend and Pirhana, and then they
all return to Amanda’s bathroom in order to get Darcy and Elizabeth
back into the plot of Pride and Prejudice. When Amanda opens the
door, she turns to her friend and flatmate and says, ‘you should
see this Pirhana … I’m talking ten minutes max.’ Pirhana replies,
‘Amanda … I’m black.’ Pirhana’s declaration comes only minutes
after Darcy has made a racist comment about a black passenger on a
bus, and as Alice Ridout suggests, they both highlight ‘the serious and
threatening discomfort experienced by people of colour in Austen’s
world’ (Ridout, 2010: 22). Of course, the series ironizes this critique
with Pirhana’s further comments: ‘what’s more, I cannot live without
chocolate, electricity or bog paper … even for ten minutes’. The Jane
Austen Book Club also has a character who cannot partake of Austen’s
magic. The final scene of the film takes place at a charity event with
all the book club members in attendance. They all sit together at a
round table at this formal event, as Bernadette enters and introduces
them to her seventh husband. As noted above, all the main players
have found a partner; in addition, Prudie is pregnant, fulfilling the
idealized version of the postfeminist family. They all exclaim their
happiness over Bernadette’s marriage, and toast the couple who have
taken to the dance floor. In this collective happy ending, Allegra,
Sylvia and Daniel’s lesbian daughter, is the only book club member
without a partner. The film does not self-consciously highlight her
status. However, as the camera pulls away from the table and the
characters all toast each other, it is impossible not to notice all the
couples next to each other and Allegra on her own. Feminist critics
of postfeminism have argued that its discourse of individualism and
neo-traditionalism finds its perfect expression in white heterosexual
femininity. While upholding its image of the independent, middle-
class, heterosexual white woman as an image available to all, postfem-
inism largely ignores or deracinates black women, caricatures lesbians
as angry and unfeminine, and dismisses poor women as hopeless.
The authority of Austen’s authorship
The figure of the woman author appears in both these Austen-related

films. I will consider the more marginal and troubling representation
of her in The Jane Austen Book Club later; for now, I want to consider
how Austen shares the authority of her authorship with her read-
ers. While in Austenland Jane draws in her sketchbook vignettes of
her fantasies of finding ‘her Darcy’ while she is there. After Jane has
spent half her time taking a back seat to Miss Charming and Miss
Heartwright due to her lower status, she calls Molly and says that
it is not going well and that she bought the ‘cheap package and
I don’t even think my character gets the happily ever after story’. At
this point, she has the sketchbook in her lap and flips through the
pages. Molly asks her what she is going to do, then the film cuts to
Jane in Miss Charming’s room declaring ‘I’m going to take charge of
my story. An Austen heroine gets engaged by the end of the book, so
that is what I’m going to do’! Jane then ‘writes’ her own Austen story
by changing dresses and her hair and saying sharp, witty things like
Elizabeth Bennet and being less of a wallflower like Fanny Price.
Her sketchbook plays a role in bringing her romantic plot to frui-
tion. In a flirtatious moment, Mr Nobley flips through it and says,
‘Ah you are an artist’, to which Jane humbly and properly protests,
‘They are just dumb sketches.’ At the end of the film, Jane discovers
her attempt to take charge of her own Austen ending was a failure
and that her romantic dash from the ball with the gardener was actu-
ally set up for her by Mrs Wattlesbrook. Jane expresses her fury and
frustration with what now feels like a deception by threatening to sue
Mrs Wattlebrook. Jane bought into it, of course; she spent her life’s
savings on it. And though she got what she was promised, having her
autonomy taken away from her when she thought she had figured
out how to sneak it in breaks the spell. At Heathrow, Mr Nobley and
the gardener chase after her: one to stop her suing and one to express
his true love. Instead, Jane tells them both the fantasy has cured her,
and she shouts to the entire airport, ‘Did you hear that England??
I AM OVER IT!’
To my mind, Austenland the ‘experience’ is the ultimate metaphor
for postfeminism. It entices with the promise that a woman can
have it all, but it requires that she invest everything, and all it really
promises is a slight variation on the same thing that everyone gets.
Moreover, even when a woman tries to assert her own identity to get
what she wants, she finds what she wants has already been decided
for her. The search for female agency has pre-emptively been co-
opted and compromised. The appeal of Jane Austen to postfeminism,
then, is not rooted in whether she is conservative or progressive, but

rather in the idea of her as a sign of female agency also doubly entan-
gled. She is both popular and a member of the canon; she writes
‘romances’ but is taken seriously; her life does not match the stories
she wrote, and forever some critics will call her feminist and some an
anti-feminist. For a contemporary woman to navigate postfeminism
and its expectations successfully is impossible; Austen makes space to
express the illegible rage against that oppression of agency possible.
At the same time, she offers the option to identify with someone
who did not fulfil the expectations of women in her life but who is
remembered as great for her work. For women authors of both chick
lit and chick flicks, she may well also offer the possibility of borrow-
ing her authorial identity to navigate the strictures and limits on
women in sexist industries.
Of course, my overriding interest is in how she might appeal to
women filmmakers, so I want to end this chapter by making a com-
parison. In one of the founding works of feminist literary criticism of
Austen, Claudia Johnson argues,
The fact that Austen is a female novelist has made assessments

of her artistic enterprise qualitatively different from those of her
male counterparts. Because of it, she has been admitted into the
canon on terms which cast doubt on her qualifications for entry
and which ensure that her presence there be regarded as an act of
gallantry. (1998: xiii–xiv)
We might easily read Andrew Sarris’ comments about the few

women who directed movies, in the section on Ida Lupino in The
American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968, as similar in
attitude:
Ida Lupino’s directed films express much of the feeling if little

of the skill which she has projected so admirably as an actress.
But while we are on the subject: Lilian Gish … once directed a
film … and declared afterward that directing was no job for a lady.
Simone de Beauvoir would undoubtedly argue the contrary, but
relatively few women have put the matter to the test. Dorothy
Arzner, Jacqueline Audrey, Ms. Sidney Drew, Lilian Ducey,
Julia Crawford Ivers, Frances Marion, Vera McCord, Frances
Nordstrom, Mrs. Wallace Reid, Lois Weber, and Margery Wilson

come to mind as little more than a ladies’ auxiliary. (1996: 216)
Of course, we should recognize that much has changed in film

scholarship since The American Cinema was published in 1968, espe-
cially in approaches to authorship and the influence of feminist film
theory and criticism. As such, his comments now appear elitist. But,
as I have been pointing to throughout this book, the unchanging low
numbers of women directors and women in other behind-the-scenes
roles, and the rarity of big awards for films made by women, suggest
that wider film culture has not shifted much from his view. As a well-
known female authorial figure who is widely popular and critically
acclaimed, loved for her feminine themes and lauded for genius,
Austen’s authorship embodies – even as she exists only as an idea
pieced together through her few letters, her juvenilia, her novels and
our readings of them – an idealized image of female authority and
agency that is both feminine and feminist. It cannot be that surpris-
ing why she might appeal to contemporary women filmmakers, who,
no matter what they do to work against the historical and structural
sexism of the film industry, cannot acquire the simultaneous popu-
larity and general critical acclaim afforded to contemporary directors
such as Tarantino, Scorsese, Spielberg, Soderbergh, Wes Anderson
and more. Borrowing Austen’s popularity and canonical status might
be one way of negotiating the limitations on women authors while
still being a woman author.
As I mentioned above, The Jane Austen Book Club also includes the
figure of the woman writer. Allegra’s girlfriend Corrinne is a writer,
and Allegra says, ‘If she had to choose between me and writing,
she’d probably choose writing.’ What she does not know at first is
that Corinne takes her ideas for writing from Allegra’s life. There is
one about her skydiving, one about her parents’ divorce, and one
childhood story when Allegra was cruel to a developmentally disa-
bled boy that she told to Corinne while in the bath. Allegra finds out
about the stories when she finds a rejection letter from a magazine in
the trash, and upset by the betrayal, she breaks up with Corinne. It
is important, I think, that Corinne is not a member of the book club.
She has not been a part of that authorized feminine space in which
Austen reigns, and it seems to me that it is no coincidence that
Allegra is the only single one left at the end of the film. In the novel,
she is in a new relationship, which is hinted at in the film, but not

included in the final happy ending. Daniel’s reunion with Sylvia is
not only brought about by the magical Austen I described above, but
by actually reading Austen. He reads Persuasion and joins the group
for their discussion of it, which is when he makes his first gestures
towards reconciliation. Prudie reconciles with her husband by asking
him to read Persuasion aloud to her, which he resists at first, but the
more he reads, the more we can see their body language signalling a
renewed intimacy. By the logic of the film, Austen’s novels must be
read by both members of a couple. Corinne has not read the novels
(as far as we know) and cannot be reconciled with Allegra. Moreover,
I want to suggest, by not being an Austen reader, she cannot draw
on Austen’s ‘magic’ to authorize her writing. Troublingly Corinne is
the only black character in the film. Her race implicitly emphasizes
her exclusion, but as I have been arguing all along in this chapter,
what Austen-related adaptations have to say is much more about
us than it ever is about Austen. The image of female agency that
Austen invokes – one that is both feminine and feminist, popular
and important – is still resolutely white and middle class. As I have
said elsewhere in this book, the limits on women’s authorship are
even sharper for black women; consequently, the search for female
agency in authorship is co-opted and compromised by our postfemi-
nist neoliberal culture and economy, and we cannot expect or hope
for magical doors to open for any of us.
Conclusion: The Secret Life of Bees
and Authorial Subversion
I concluded the last two chapters by pointing to the ubiquity of

the textual, industrial, and cultural whiteness of authorship. Paula
Masood points out that
of the African-American women directors who released feature

films in the 1990s – Julie Dash, Gina Prince-Bythewood, Kasi
Lemmons, Darnell Martin and Cheryl Dune – only Martin and
Lemmons have secured financing and successfully completed
second features, Prison Song (2001) and The Caveman’s Valentine
(2002). (Masood, 2012: 249, fn. 27)
Since 2002, Martin has released Cadillac Records (2008), Lemmons

Talk To Me (2007) and Black Nativity (2013), and Gina Prince-
Bythewood The Secret Life of Bees (2008). In the context of a chapter
on black women’s urban films and their absence from histories of
black urban cinema, Masood makes a suggestive point about what
kinds of films are possible for black women filmmakers:
The difference with these features is, however, that … they focus
on male leads. Moreover, the protagonists are played by Q-Tip
and Samuel L. Jackson, respectively, thus guaranteeing name rec-
ognition and a sizable box office. If African-American women are
to continue making films after their debut, industry history sug-
gests, unfortunately, that they cannot focus on young women, or
perhaps, African-American women of any age. (2012: 249, fn. 27)
139
Since Masood’s comments, Gina Prince-Bythewood released her first

feature film Love and Basketball (2000). Critically acclaimed in the
reviews, the film made over $27 million of its $20 million budget. It
also won several awards: Best Actress at the BET (Black Entertainment
Television) Awards; Best Actress and Best Director, amongst others,
at the Black Reel Awards; two NAACP Image Awards; the Humanitas
Prize (award to writing intended to promote human dignity, mean-
ing, and freedom); and the Best First Screenplay at the Independent
Spirit Awards.
However, after all those signs of success, it is worth pointing out
that it took Prince-Bythewood eight years to release another feature
film (The Secret Life of Bees).Getting her first film released at all was a
difficult experience, as she explains in an interview:
I thought that Love and Basketball would be an easy sell, and it was
really shocking to me that no one wanted it. Production compa-
nies like Magic Johnson’s were interested, but once we got to the
studio level they weren’t feeling it, and that was a hard thing,
because I feel like we keep having to prove ourselves despite
the success of films like Waiting to Exhale and Soul Food. We still
get the same argument that Black dramas don’t sell. (Alexander,
2003: 386)
I have discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 how hard it can be for women

filmmakers to sustain careers in filmmaking after their first features.
As Prince-Bythewood’s and Masood’s comments above suggest, black
women filmmakers who face prejudice against both their gender and
race face many more obstructions to their desire for authorship than
do white women filmmakers. Masood’s suggestion that those few black
women who have made features since the 1990s seem to be able to get
only male-centred films funded, highlights the conspicuous absence
of representations of black women’s lives on screen. The researchers
of the Annual Celluloid Ceiling Report have found that in the top
100 grossing films of 2013, only 15% of identifiable protagonists
were female. Of those female protagonists, only 15% were African-
American. The percentages are only worse for Latina women (5%) and
Asian women (3%).1 It is worth noting that two of the adaptations
I mentioned in Chapter 3 – Waiting to Exhale and The Joy Luck Club –
are two high-grossing films that feature multiple African-American
Conclusion 141
and Asian characters, respectively. The role of pre-sold audiences in

bringing ethnic minority characters to the screen seems obvious here.
However, to return to one of my main concerns, both were directed
by men. The Secret Life of Bees, adapted from the novel by Sue Monk
Kidd, stands out, then, for representing black women’s lives and,
moreover, for being directed by a black woman, who, significantly,
adapted a novel (Prince-Bythewood is both writer and director) by a
white woman. Like the other adaptations in this book, The Secret Life of
Bees features the figure of the female author, though she is a young girl
who hopes to be a writer some day. There are several other ways that
the text and its reception function similarly to the seven other adapta-
tions, and I want to look closely at these similarities and pay attention
to the discourses around the representation of black women’s lives and
black women’s authorship that the film raises in order to conclude
my discussion of the difficulties and possibilities of the figure of the
female author representing female agency in film.
In both the novel and film, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of
14-year old Lily Owens (played by Dakota Fanning), who, when she
was four years old, accidentally killed her mother when she tried
to give her mother a gun to protect herself from Lily’s father. She
tries to remember her mother by hiding a few trinkets in a box she
keeps buried in an orchard, and her father punishes her by mak-
ing her kneel on uncooked grits when he finds it. After that, T. Ray
(Lily’s father) makes Rosaleen, who worked on his peach grove, Lily’s
maternal caregiver. Early on in the film, we see Lily sitting at the
peach stand and writing in her notebook, and in the novel we learn
that an insightful teacher told Lily that she could be ‘a professor and
writer of actual books’ (Kidd, 19). The story is set in South Carolina
in 1964, just as President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act into law.
Rosaleen (played by Jennifer Hudson) wants to make her newfound
right to vote official, and Lily goes with her when she heads for
town. Threatened by white men who taunt Rosaleen by saying she
probably cannot sign her own name, she takes her can of chewing
tobacco spit and uses it to spell her name across their shoes. She is
arrested for disorderly conduct, but is put in the hospital because
the white men beat her and to protect her from further beatings.
T. Ray is enraged at Lily’s solidarity with Rosaleen, and Lily decides
they must escape. They leave with only Lily’s idea to go to Tiburon
County because one of her keepsakes of her mother is a card with
the image of a black Mary, mother of Jesus. After seeing the same
Mary on jars of honey in a Tiburon storefront, Lily and Rosaleen
end up at the Boatwright sisters’ home. August Boatwright (played
by Queen Latifah), June Boatwright (played by Alicia Keys), and May
Boatwright (played by Sophie Okonedo) live in a bright pink house.
August keeps bees and sells the honey Lily found with the black Mary
on the jars; June teaches music at the black high school, and May,
whose twin-sister April died, takes care of the house.
The Secret Life of Bees has many parallels with the generational sister-
hoods of Chapter 3; however, I want to think about the adaptation in
comparison to some of the other authorial figures in this book first.
Lily may seem a far cry from the women of Chapter 2 but like Jean in
The Weight of Water, Morvern in Morvern Callar, and Frannie in In the
Cut, Lily must survive in the face of male opposition. Lily’s father, we
are told, abused her mother and on the day that Lily accidentally kills
her, her mother has the gun out because she is trying to leave him.
Lily’s version of her mother that she kept alive in the box of trinkets
is the story that sustains her in her father’s house. After Rosaleen’s
arrest, Lily stands up to his abuse by shouting that her mother would
never have let him hurt her, and then T. Ray uses his patriarchal power
to destroy Lily’s narrative of her loving mother: he tells her that her
mother left without her and that the day she died she ‘had only come
back for the rest of her things’. T. Ray eventually tracks Lily down at
the Boatwright’s house, and their confrontation is partly about Lily’s
need to refute his version of the story. In the novel, she wants to know
if she really did kill her mother, and T. Ray says, ‘It was you who did it,
Lily. You didn’t mean it, but it was you’ (Kidd, 370). Lily is not allowed
the revision of her mother’s story that she has craved for her entire
life; in the end, her only comfort is that her father has a habit of lying.
The film offers Lily much more than this comfort, however. T. Ray
leaves her at the Boatwrights’ with a muttered ‘Good riddance’, but
Lily runs after him and asks if the day her mother died, she really
came back only for her things. Her father tells her, ‘No. No, she was
coming for you.’ When she asks him why he lied, he says, ‘Because
she didn’t come for me.’ By allowing him to express his pain at his
wife’s rejection the film redeems T. Ray if only in a small way by giving
us reason to be sympathetic to his loss. However, the father-daughter
resolution, I would suggest, functions to set up Lily’s voiceover as she
turns away from him and turns toward the Boatwright sisters, August
and June (May has died earlier) and Rosaleen who has become one
Conclusion 143
of them, and says ‘I still tell myself that when T. Ray drove away that
day, he wasn’t saying goodriddance. He was saying Lily you are bet-
ter off there with all these mothers. I have more mothers than any
three other girls.’
Lily continues to speak as the scene changes from her seeking sol-
ace at the statue of the black Mary in the house, to her sitting at a
desk, writing in a journal the exact words she speaks. The story her
father told her about her life, she now knows is false. The journal,
then, signifies not only her desire to claim an authorial identity
someday but also her need to write her own story, to self-authorize,
and consequently, to assert her agency. Earlier in the film, Lily tells
Zach, a boy her age who works with August keeping the bees, ‘I was
planning on being a writer, but I don’t think I got much of a future
now, being an orphan and all.’ Like in How to Make an American Quilt
and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Lily’s authorial identity
in the end, however nascent, is inextricably intertwined with her
mother. The Secret Life of Bees also, then, is concerned with maternal
legacies of female agency, even as that legacy may be an absence
rather than a presence, as I discussed in Chapter One. And, like How
to Make an American Quilt and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood,
Prince-Bythewood’s film foregrounds an intergenerational sisterhood
as the space in which female authorship as a representation of female
agency can flourish. In The Secret Life of Bees, however, the sisterhood
are black women who take care of an adolescent white girl. Because,
as we find out, August used to work as Lily’s mother’s nanny, the rela-
tionship between Lily and these women, which includes Rosaleen
(who was Lily’s nanny before they left) inevitably evokes the image
of the mammy. Micki Mcelya makes a strong critique of this persis-
tent image of the black woman:
The myth of the faithful slave lingers because so many white

Americans have wished to live in a world in which African
Americans are not angry over past and present injustices, a world
in which white people were and are not complicit, in which the
injustices themselves – of slavery, Jim Crow, and on going struc-
tural racism – seem not to exist at all. The mammy figure affirmed
their wishes. (2007: 3)
The ease with which August and her sisters (though June is wary
at first) take the young white Lily into their lives belies the dangers
of such an arrangement in 1960s South Carolina. This fantasy of

black feminine space as a safe place for white femininity cannot
but be read in line with Mcelya’s argument above about white
Americans’ wish-fulfilment.
However, I want to point to one particular example of Prince-
Bythewood’s authorship of the film and the screenplay that adapts
the novel, and how it resists, to an extent, the full fantasy of this
wish-fulfilment for white Americans. In the novel, August, after tell-
ing Lily that her mother came to the Boatwrights when she left Lily
and that she did not know if she returned to get her daughter, tells
Lily, ‘I want you to know, I love you. Just like I loved your mother’
(Kidd, 300). Consequently, Kidd’s August fulfils the role of the faith-
ful slave that continues to construct the image of the ‘voluntary’
mammy:
The faithful slave narrative … argued that enslaved people

appeared faithful and caring not because they had to be or were
violently compelled to be, but because their fidelity was heartfelt
and indicative of their love for and dependence on their owners.
(Mcelya, 2007: 6)
Prince-Bythewood rewrites this scene, so that when Lily asks, ‘You

really loved her?’ August responds circumspectly: ‘It was compli-
cated. But yes, I did.’ When Lily asks how it was complicated, August
explains, ‘I was her nanny. Things were different in her world than
mine. We like to think that love is pure and limitless, but love like
that can exist in a hateful time’. After a pause she adds with an
affectionate laugh, ‘But she made me love her anyway’. Though it
ends with the confirmation that black nannies can voluntarily love
their charges, this scene is self-conscious about the realities of black
women’s service to white women, and we can see the black woman
filmmaker’s signature over it. And yet, like Rozema’s identification
with Fanny, Prince-Bythewood’s authority over the adaptation comes
through her identification with Lily:
I was adopted by a Salvadorian mother and a white father.

Growing up having a complete identity crisis. Then my search for
my mother and trying to find out why I was given up, and how
could a mother give up a child, then finding out the circumstances
Conclusion 145
of my birth was pretty traumatizing. I was able to put all that into
[Lily’s] journey. (Rich, 2008)
Her declaration of her identification with Lily functions similarly to

Patricia Rozema’s claims of identifying with Fanny Price in Chapter 1.
Here, she uses her identification with the character not to create
another level of identification with the author, but instead her iden-
tification with the character is her route to putting her own signa-
ture on the film: the black woman filmmaker’s appropriation of the
white woman’s novel is bound up with the figure of the young white
female author in the text, whose non-biological, inter-racial family
reflects that of the director herself.
In Chapter 3, I quoted Lauren Berlant on the practice of white
women co-opting the stories of minority and working-class women
to elevate their own stories of pain in a sexist and unfair world:
As long as they have had a public sphere, bourgeois white women

writers have mobilized fantasies of what black and working-class
interiority based on suffering must feel like in order to find a
language for their own more privileged suffering at the hands of
other women, men, and callous institutions. (Berlant, 2008: 6)
I think it is possible to see Prince-Bythewood’s film as a reversal of this

power relationship. Kate Stables fairly sums up the ambivalent experi-
ence of this film, which seems to be of the same mode as The Help
(Taylor, 2011), which was much criticized for its central narrative of
redemptive white femininity: ‘Heartening though it is to see a 1960s-
set movie in which black women characters aren’t housekeepers, it
would be even more gratifying to see one in which they aren’t there
to clean up someone else’s emotional mess instead’ (Stables, 2009).
And yet, in the midst of their conventionality, films like How to Make
an American Quilt and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood still articu-
late, as I argue, their women author’s claim on cultural legitimacy by
reflecting the filmmakers’ authorial position in the self-authorizing
narratives of the authorial figures in the texts. I want to argue that
this claim can also be made for Prince-Bythewood and The Secret Life
of Bees. At the end of the film, when the journal Lily has been writing
in is clearly the ‘novel’ of The Secret Life of Bees, she takes it to the wall
that June built to store all her empathetic pain. Before she dies, June
feels deeply everyone else’s pain – from her sister’s fear of marriage
to Zach’s pain and fear while he is in jail for taking Lily to the cin-
ema – and her crying incapacitates her. Her only solace is what the
Boatwright sisters call her ‘wailing wall’. She writes down the pain
she feels, and she puts the notes in the crevice of the wall. When, at
the end of the film, Lily puts her journal in the wall, the narrative
suggests that Lily’s pain will be safely put away and replaced with the
love in her newfound home full of mothers. But it also means that
what she wrote will become warped and faded in the rain and heat
of the south, unreadable. The faded ‘book’ of her story will become
unreadable. We see that it has happened to all of June’s notes in the
wall, when Lily pulls one out earlier. Like Lynne Ramsay’s re-making
of Morvern Callar takes back the woman’s voice from the male author,
Prince-Bythewood’s film takes back the black woman’s story from the
white woman author, even as it allows Lily her youthful authorial
identity. Earlier, as I note above, Lily has said that she does not have
much hope of becoming a writer, but she, like many of the other
authorial figures in the films in this book, survives the threats against
her and the hope for her future authorship remains. The journal/
book Lily writes of her story does not exist in Kidds’ novel. If, as
I have been arguing, the figure of the female author in the film text
is the ‘ideal figure’ of female agency within postmodern, postfemi-
nist culture, then, Prince-Bythewood’s inclusion of the journal at the
end of the film, which gives reason for Lily’s voiceover, is another
place in which she inserts her voice into the conversation. Prince-
Bythewood’s appropriation of Kidd’s novel and the signifiers of her
authorial signature on the film include Lily giving up her story to
all the other voices and stories in the wailing wall. Lily as a female
authorial figure somewhat paradoxically stands in for the filmmaker
both by Prince-Bythewood’s identification with the character but
also through her authority as the filmmaker to have Lily symboli-
cally submit her voice to a collective one.
If, as I suggested at the beginning of this book, the ‘subversive
potential’ of adaptation may be ‘part of the appeal of adapting for
adapters and audiences alike’, might not this subversive potential
be particularly attractive to women filmmakers and female audi-
ences? The women filmmakers in this book have found their voices
in these adaptations by collaborating with and appropriating the
source novels. By making film adaptations, they all construct their
Conclusion 147
claims for female agency and authority through sharing the autho-
rial signature. They also, in the midst of that shared authority, claim
their ownership over the films in their own words and in the rep-
resentation of the female authors in the films. The ‘ideal figure’ of
human agency here is the author but she is the author who speaks
outside the individualized, masculinized identity of the auteur and
speaks in conversation with others. Feminist critics, who are both
members of a female audience and individual female authors, cannot
afford to ignore the subversive potential in adaptations combined
with the disruptive potential of women’s authorship, especially in a
postfeminist culture that continually attempts to contain any sign
of women’s resistance to its hegemonic agenda. We need, I would
suggest, to continue to shed light on those areas of culture in which
female agency speaks, as well as to listen to the conversations being
had there.
Notes
Introduction
1. See, ‘The Cannes Film Festival Begins, but Are There Enough Women
Directors In it?’ Metro (14 May 2014) accessed at: http://metro.
co.uk/2014/05/14/the-cannes-film-festival-begins-but-are-there-enough-
women-directors-in-it-4726722/; and Melissa Silverstein, ‘Cannes Watch:
A Call to Action on Behalf of Female Filmmakers’, Forbes (14 May 2014)
accessed at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/melissasilverstein/2014/05/14/
cannes-watch-a-call-to-action-on-behalf-of-female-filmmakers/
2. For an analysis of this trend in the 1990s, see Laurie Ouellette, ‘Reel Women:
Feminism and Narrative Pleasure in New Women’s Cinema’, The Independent
(April 1995), 28–34. For indications of this trend in the 1980s see Michelle
Citron, ‘Women’s Film Production: Going Mainstream’, in E. Deidre Pribram,
ed. Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television (London: Verso, 1988).
3. It may be worth noting that Hollinger leaves out Orlando, which may be
a reflection of her criticism of the film with which I engage in Chapter 1.
4. Data taken from boxofficemojo.com
5. McRobbie speaks to this idea of individual female success as representa-
tive of postfeminism’s taking feminism ‘into account’ in her article on
postfeminism (see previous note) by referencing the right-wing UK press’s
endorsement of the ambitious ‘TV Blonde’ type (see page 31). The excep-
tional successful female is easily co-opted by neo-conservative rhetorics of
individualism that suggest that feminism is not necessary because ‘success’
for women is a matter of choice.
6. See Karen Hohne and Helen Wussow, eds., A Dialogue of Voices: Feminist
Literary Theory and Bakhtin (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press,
1994). Conversation also evokes Edward Said’s ‘contrapuntal’ readings
of culture and history: Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London:
Vintage, 1993), xxix.
7. Even in this electronic and digital age, we experience conversations as
shared ‘space’ – we describe someone as being ‘on’ the phone, ‘on’ being
a spatial term. Even chat rooms or instant messaging require computer
space which is then compartmentalized into further spaces through the
varying programs for chatting (or conversing) online. The word ‘room’
in chat room, again, understands conversation as happening in a space.
Instant messaging has its own visual space in a separate window that
shows both the name or tag of the user of the computer at hand but
also the name of the other person in the conversation. That person may
physically be in a whole other country, but on the computer screen the
two people in conversation appear by name in the same visual space.
148
Notes 149
1 Envisioning Judith Shakespeare: Collaboration

and the Woman Author
1. See Alexandra Twin, ‘Bravo Sofia! Now What?’, CNNMoney, 26 February
2004, accessed at: http://money.cnn.com/2004/02/24/news/oscars_
women/.
2. See Manohla Dargis, ‘How Oscar Found Ms. Right’, New York Times,
10 March 2010, accessed at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/
movies/14dargis.html?_r=0.
3. The skyscrapers of the city in the shot make it clear that the scene is in
contemporary London, and in the introduction to the published script
Sally Potter writes, ‘The novel ends in 1928, but in order to keep faith
with Virginia Woolf’s use of real time in ending the novel (with the story
finishing just as she puts down her pen to finish her book), the film had
to end when it was completed – 1992.’ Sally Potter, Orlando (London: Faber
and Faber, 1994), xiii.
4. Sally Potter, Orlando, 62. The complete lyrics to the song are as follows:
I am coming! I am coming!/I am coming through!/Coming across the
divide to you/In this moment of unity/I’m feeling only an ecstasy/To be
here, to be now/At last I am free-/Yes-at last, at last/To be free of the past/
And of a future that beckons me./I am coming! I am coming!/Here I am!/
Neither a woman nor a man-/We are joined, we are one/With a human
face/We are joined, we are one/With a human face/I am on earth/And
I am in outer space/I’m being born and I am dying.
5. Other film studies work on women filmmakers include the following: Pam
Cook, ‘Approaching the Work of Dorothy Arzner’, in Feminism and Film
Theory, edited by Constance Penley (London: BFI,1988); E. Ann Kaplan,
Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (London: Methuen, 1983);
Charlotte Brunsdon, ed., Films For Women (London: BFI, 1986); B. Ruby
Rich Chick Flicks, Theories and Memories of the Feminist Film Movement
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).
6. My emphasis here is on English language filmmakers of North America,
the UK and Australia.
7. See Andrew Sarris’s, The American Cinema: Directors and Direction 1929–1968
(New York: Dutton, 1968).
8. See The Women’s Film Pioneer Project: https://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu.
9. Jane M. Gaines testifies to my first two points: ‘Some efforts were made
by feminists, beginning in the 1970s, to restore to critical importance the
work of such silent-film directors as Alice Guy-Blaché and Germain Dulac
and such sound-era pioneers as Ida Lupino and Dorothy Arzner. Then the
pipeline of discoveries seemed to dry up and, like other feminist scholars,
I assumed that there had been only a handful of women working in the
U.S. and European film industries – a few in the silent era before 1927 and
a few more in the sound era.’ Jaine M. Gaines, ‘Of Cabbages and Authors’,
in A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, edited by Jennifer M. Bean and Diane
Negra (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 89.
150 Notes
10. Potter has spoken about how the reputation of The Gold Diggers was used
against her when she sought funding for Orlando. See, Lizzie Franckie,
‘A Director Comes in from the Cold: With the Making of Orlando, Sally
Potter Has Thrown Off Her Sombre Reputation’, The Guardian: Features
(11 March 1993).
11. Antje Ascheid discusses some of these films in the context of a larger
view of femininity and heritage films. See ‘Safe Rebellions: Romantic
Emancipation in the “Woman’s Heritage Film”’, Scope: An Online Journal
of Film Studies, 4 (February 2006), (1 September 2007) accessed: at http://
www.scope.nottingham.ac.uk/article.php?issue=4&id=124
12. A parallel can also be made between Woolf’s playing around with bio-
graphy as genre and Potter’s playing around with the conventions of
heritage cinema.
13. See also Hollinger and Winterhalter (2001: 252).
14. The BBC television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice aired in the United
States in January 1996.
15. In addition to Corrigan, Higson, Collins, Cartmell (‘Becoming Jane’), and
Haiduc also link Mansfield Park and Shakespeare in Love.
16. Haiduc also sees the opening images as a ‘figurative landscape’ (59).
17. See Shea for example.
2 Adapt or Die: The Dangers of Women’s Authorship

1. Recently, commentators have been making the point that a woman has
never been given the chance to direct a high-profile, potentially high-
grossing superhero film, including Bigelow who is known for her skills as
an action director. See Susan Wloszczyna, ‘Dear Hollywood: Hiring Women
Directors Could Rescue the Superhero Movie. Love, Half the Human
Race’, RogerEbert.com, 8 July 2013, accessed at: http://www.rogerebert.
com/balder-and-dash/who-says-a-woman-cant-direct-a-superhero-film-
hollywood-so-far.
2. See Miller (1985) for example.
3. As Andreas Huyssen points out in ‘Mapping the Postmodern’, ‘Isn’t
the “death of the subject/author” position tied by mere reversal to
the very ideology that invariably glorifies the artist as genius, whether
for marketing purposes or out of conviction and habit?’; Andreas
Huyssen, ‘Mapping the Postmodern’, New German Critique, no. 33 (Fall
1984): 44.
4. In order: Kiri Blakeley, Forbes, Baz Bamigobye, Daily Mail; Jane Ridley,
New York Daily News.
5. Duncan Petrie, Screening Scotland (London: BFI, 2000), 216.
6. Williams (2002); Brooks (2002); Ebert (2003); Mitchell (2002).
7. For an analysis of Morvern Callar as Art film and Scottish film, see John
Caughie, ‘Morvern Callar, Art Cinema and the “Monstrous Archive”’,
Scottish Studies Review, vol. 8, (2007) no. 1: 101–115.
Notes 151
3 Authorizing the Mother: Sisterhoods in America

1. ‘Sisterhood’ as a term related to and inflected by feminist politics is usu-
ally dated to the publication of Robin Morgan’s anthology Sisterhood Is
Powerful (New York: Vintage Books 1973), which includes the anecdote
about a pamphlet written by Kathie Sarachild that included the phrases
‘Traditional Womanhood is Dead!’ and ‘Sisterhood is Powerful!’, which
was distributed at an anti-Vietnam rally in 1968.
2. For more on how postfeminist constructions of sisterhood reduce poli-
tics to affect see Anu Koivunen, ‘Confessions of a Free Woman: Telling
Feminist Stories in Postfeminist Media Culture’, Journal of Aesthetics and
Culture, vol. 1 (2009) accessed at: http://www.aestheticsandculture.net/
index.php/jac/article/view/4644
3. All ranking and financial data is taken from boxofficemojo.com, accessed
at: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=littlewomen.htm
4. See Helene A. Shugart, ‘Isn’t It Ironic?: The Intersection of Third-Wave
Feminism and Generation X’, Women’s Studies in Communication, vol. 24,
no. 2 (2001): 131–168.
5. See Elsa Barkley Brown, ‘African-American Women’s Quilting:
A Framework for Conceptualizing and Teaching African-American
Women’s History’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 14,
no. 4 (Summer 1989): 921–929 and Cheryl B. Torsney, ‘The Critical Quilt:
Alternative Authority in Feminist Criticism’, In Contemporary Literary
Theory, edited by G. Douglas Atkins (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989).
6. For comprehensive analysis of how the novel incorporates traditions of
quiltmaking see Chouard.
7. Working on a women’s studies type of project inevitably evokes the
perennial debates about Humanities degrees as worthless for the job mar-
ket, but it does not discount the effect of the historical context.
8. See Lucie Arbutnot and Gail Seneca, ‘Pre-text and Text in Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes’, in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, edited by Patricia Erens
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
9. See Bernie Cook, Thelma and Louise Live! The Cultural Afterlife of an
American Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007).
10. The Orange Prize became the Bailey’ Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2013.
11. See ‘Fight Club Draws Techies for Bloody Underground Beatdown’,
USA Today (29 May 2006). In the afterward to the 2004 edition of the
novel, Palahniuk suggests that it was written in response to women’s
novels: ‘…bookstores were full of books like The Joy Luck Club and The
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and How to Make an American Quilt.
These were all novels that presented a social model for women to be
together. But there was no novel that presented a new social model
for men to share their lives’ (Palahniuk 214). It is worth noting that
though the other two novels were published six years before Fight Club.
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood was published in the same year as
Palahniuk’s novel, 1996.
152 Notes
12. The original website no longer seems to exist in the same form. Currently,
the author’s website rebeccawellsbooks.com hosts discussion boards and
Ya Ya groups, but much of it is dormant.
4 Postfeminist Austen: by Women, for Women,

about Women
1. Hess and her husband Jared are known for the ‘nerdy-boy’ films they co-
wrote and he directed: Napoleon Dynamite (2004), Nacho Libre (2006), and
Gentlemen Broncos (2009)
2. It is a slightly awkward moment when the interviewer asks if they are
worried that the film might come in for some of the same criticisms the
Twilight films did for being conservative and ‘heteronormative’ and it
becomes clear that his guests do not quite know what he means. J.J. Field,
who plays the Darcy-esque character in the film says ‘what was that term
you used – heterosexualtivity? – why can’t there be some who make those
kind of films and others who make other kinds. All different kinds of mov-
ies are great’. To be fair to him, the interviewer lobbed the term in without
any explanation, and during a press junket the filmmakers and actors are
obviously trying to convey that the film should be seen on its own merits.
Meyer and Hess do seem to get it later when Meyer points out that the
main character Jane reaches a point of accepting her singleness before the
film gives her ‘the cherry on the top’ happy ending, and Hess points out
that there are indications that a whole gay party-scene is going on in the
background of the façade of Austenland.
3. For an overview of the main debates see Looser (1995).
4. Jones’ article is clearly meant to refute the feminist literary critical tradi-
tion of Austen studies begun by Margaret Kirkham and followed by Audrey
Bilger and others.
5. For more on heritage films and postfeminism see Ascheid.
6. See Lauren Hendersons’, Jane Austen’s Guide to Dating (London: Headline
Book Publishing, 2005).
7. In one of the several self-consciously postmodern moments of the film,
after the poster’s head falls forward, the film cuts to the television where
Darcy stops walking with a look of horror and surprise. This moment in
the television serial is when he happens upon Elizabeth Bennet and her
aunt and uncle touring the grounds of his estate.
Conclusion: The Secret Life of Bees and Authorial

Subversion
1. See Martha M. Lauzen, ‘It’s a Man’s (Celluloid) World’, accessed at: http://
womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/files/2013_It’s_a_Man’s_World_Report.pdf.
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Index
Academy Awards, see awards and authority, 1, 2, 13, 14, 15, 16,
adaptation studies, 1, 4, 12, 81 17, 20, 26, 29, 38, 43–4, 46–7,
Aisha (Ojha, 2010), 117 61, 68, 78, 144, 146, 147
A League of Their Own (Marshall, and black women, 18, 56, 97–8,
1994), 7, 21, 85 112, 138, 139–41, 144, 145–6
A Modern Pride and Prejudice (Mae, and genius, 2, 55–7, 67, 68, 137,
2011), 117 150 (n3)
Angel in the House, 26, 32, 33, 34, 59 identification, 17, 18, 20, 29,
Alcott, Louisa May, see Little Women 31–2, 35, 46, 115, 144–5, 146
Andrew, Geoff, 67 co-authorship see also
Andrus, Mark, 105 collaboration, 13–4
Angelou, Maya, 93, 97–8, 104 masculine/male authorship, 1, 2,
Annual Celluloid Ceiling Report, 3, 5, 12–13, 17, 20, 22, 24
19, 80, 140, 152(n1) the writer, 2, 4, 14, 15, 20, 24, 25,
Aragay, Mireia, 37, 150(n), 152(n) 27, 30, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40,
Armstrong, Gillian, 15, 17, 81, 83–4, 42–3, 46, 47, 48, 56, 59, 64, 68,
88, 90 69, 74–5, 83, 91, 97, 98, 104,
Arzner, Dorothy, 3, 93 109, 123, 137, 141, 143, 146
Ascheid, Antje, 88 women filmmakers, 1–9, 15, 16,
Authority, 14 17, 18, 19–20, 21–2, 24, 25, 27,
and authorship, see authorship 32, 35, 36, 37, 38, 41, 43, 45,
and Jane Austen, 115, 126, 129, 47, 48, 49–51, 52, 62–3, 73,
134–7 74, 80–1, 84, 92, 93, 102, 103,
and literature, 4, 41, 56 104, 105, 107, 112, 115, 116–7,
and masculinity, 20, 22, 52, 56–7, 136–7, 139, 140–1, 145, 146
73, 74 Austen, Jane, 10, 17, 18, 20, 22,
and women, 56, 71 37–41, 41–8, 83–4, 113–121,
auteur/auteurism, 1–2, 5, 10, 12, 16, 121–5, 125–9, 129–132, 132–4,
20, 22, 25, 48, 55, 56, 57, 65, 134–8, 152(n)
73, 91, 147 Austenland (Hess, 2013), 13, 18, 114,
authorship 117, 118, 124, 125, 129–32,
and adaptation, 4, 12–14, 15, 20, 132–4, 134–8
22, 25, 35, 37–8, 43–8, 52, 62, awards, 2, 137, 140
64, 67, 70, 78, 82, 84, 92–3, Academy Awards, 21, 49, 63,
105, 112, 137–138, 147 105
and agency, 1–2, 4, 15, 16, 17, 18, Black Entertrainment Television,
32, 35, 37, 39, 40, 51, 57, 62, 140
73, 75, 82, 84, 86, 88–9, 90, 92, Black Reel, 140
97, 109, 111, 112, 118, 135–6, Humanitas Prize, 140
137, 138, 141, 143, 146–7 Independent Spirit, 140
162
Index 163
NAACP Image, 140 Chouard, Géraldine, 95, 151(n)

Palme d’Or, 3, 22, 49 Clueless (Heckerling, 1995), 6, 38,
83, 117, 129
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against collaboration see also conversation,
Women (Faludi, 1992), 8–9, 21, 13–14, 17, 19–20, 22, 27, 63, 77,
30–1, 120 81, 84
Bancroft, Anne, 93 Collins, Jim, 38, 41, 42
Barker, Deborah, 108 conversation see also collaboration,
Barron, Stephanie, 118 10–14, 17, 20, 22, 27, 31–2, 38,
Bean, Jennifer, 35 41, 48, 60, 80, 146, 147
Benson-Allot, Caetlin 53 Cook, Pam, 3, 149(n)
Berlant, Lauren, 80, 94, 96, 104, Coppola, Sofia, 3, 21, 22
106, 110, 145 Corrigan, Timothy, 1, 36–7, 40, 57,
Bigelow, Kathryn, 3, 7, 10, 17, 21, 150(n)
49–50, 52–3, 62–3, 81, 150(n) Cukor, George, 83
Black Nativity (Lemmons, 2013), 139
Bodyguard, The ( Jackson, 1992), 7, 21 Dargis, Manohla, 53, 54, 149(n)
Bolton, Lucy, 66, 67, 72 Dash, Julie, 139
Bordwell, David, 72 DeBona, Guerica, 12, 13
Bowlby, Rachel, 24, 25 Del Sorbo, Agata, 46
Bradshaw, Peter, 40 Deutelbaum, Marshall, 94
Bride and Prejudice (Chada, 2004), dialogism, 10–11, 12
117 Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
Bridget Jones’s Diary (Maguire, 2001), (Khouri, 2002), 7, 17, 80–1,
117 90–2, 105–9, 143, 145, 151(n)
Bridget Jones’s Diary: The Edge of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
Reason (Kidron, 2004), 117 (Wells, 1996), 91, 106–7, 151(n)
Brooker, Will, 53 Dobie, Madeleine, 123
Brooks, Xan, 66 Dowell, Pat, 34
Bruckheimer, Bonnie, 105 Do-yeon, Jeon, 3
Brundsdon, Charlotte, 3 Dune, Cheryl, 139
Burke, Sean, 15
Burstyn, Ellen, 93 Eagleton, Mary, 1
Ebert, Roger, 53, 101, 116, 150(n)
Cadillac Records (Martin, 2008), 139 Emma (Austen, 1815) 38, 117
Campion, Jane, 3, 10, 17, 19, 21–2, Emma (McGrath, 1996), 39, 44, 117
45, 49–50, 52, 74, 77, 81
Cartmell, Deborah, 31, 43, 150(n) Faludi, Susan, 8, 21, 30, 120
Cash, Floris Barnett, 98 Father of the Bride (Shyer, 1991), 21
Caughie, John, 63, 150(n) Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan,
Caveman’s Valentine, The (Lemmons, 1963), 96, 109
2001), 139 feminism
Chamberlain, Lori, 14 and academia, see feminist
chick flicks, 7–8, 9, 21, 74, 82, 90–1, criticism
108, 115–17, 136 backlash against, 8, 9, 21, 30–1,
chick lit, 120–1, 136 100, 120
Chocano, Carina, 115, 116 and generations, 2, 24, 27, 30–2
164 Index
feminism – continued How to Make an American Quilt

feminist filmmaking, 3, 5–7, 9, 11, (Moorehouse, 1995), 7, 9, 17,
14, 27, 28 80–2, 90–112, 143, 145
feminist criticism, 8, 11, 14, How to Make an American Quilt
29–30, 32, 90, 95, 121 (Otto, 1991), 91, 94–8, 106–8,
feminist literary studies, 2, 14, 151(n)
22, 24, 29, 43, 56, 95, 118–20, Humm, Maggie, 34–5
123, 124, 125, 136, 137, Hutcheon, Linda, 12, 14
152(n4)
feminist film studies, 1, 3, 4, 6, In Her Shoes (Hanson, 2005), 115,
7, 19, 20, 24, 81, 88, 103, 120, 116
137, 149(n9) In the Cut (Campion, 2003), 17, 51,
Fetterley, Judith, 88 52, 74–8, 142
fidelity, 4, 10, 14, 17, 22, 27–8, 31, In the Cut (Moore, 2003), 75–8
43–4, 48, 51, 52, 81, 91
Fight Club (Palahniuk, 1996), 105, James, Caryn, 93
151(n) James, Henry, 22, 39, 45
First Wives Club, The (Wilson, 1996), Jane Austen Book Club, The (Swicord,
91 2007), 18, 114–17, 118, 124–5,
Firth, Colin, 129–30, 134 125–9, 133–4, 134–7
Foucault, Michel, 68–9 Jane Austen Mysteries (Barron, 1996 –),
Fowler, Karen Jay, 118 118
Franklin, Miles, 15 Janeite, 115–16, 128
Fried Green Tomatoes (Avnet, 1991), Jermyn, Deborah, 53–5, 56, 58, 62–3
7, 21, 80, 91 Johnson, Claudia, 136
Johnson, Liza, 66, 67, 72
Garrett, Roberta, 7 Johnson, Mark, 11
Gay, Penny, 119 Johnston, Claire, 3, 4, 24, 92, 93
Geraghty, Christine, 10 Jones, Vivien, 120–1, 123, 152(n)
Ghost (Zucker, 1990), 7, 21 Joy Luck Club, The (Wang, 1993),
Gibson, Pamela Church, 40 91, 140
Gilbert, Sandra, 24, 59, 123 Just Like Heaven (Waters, 2005), 8
Gill, Rosalind, 114, 131–2
Gillis, Stacy, 30–1 Kaplan, Deborah, 119
Gold Diggers, The (Potter, 1983), Karlyn, Kathleen Rowe, 82–3, 89,
27 100
Golombisky, Kim, 101 Kelley, Margot Anne, 98
Gubar, Susan, 24, 59, 123 Khouri, Callie, 50, 82, 105
Kidd, Sue Monk, 18, 141, 142, 144,
Haiduc, Sonia, 20, 40, 89, 150(n) 146
Hale, Shannon, 118 Kirkham, Margaret, 43, 123, 152
Hess, Jerusha, 117, 130, 152(n) Kuhn, Annette, 3, 5, 6–7, 24, 35
Higson, Andrew, 40
Holden, Stephen, 40 Laird, Holly, 13–14, 47
Hollinger, Karen, 6, 7, 28, 32, 83, Lakoff, George, 11
84, 85, 148(n) Landay, Lori, 69, 71, 73
hooks, bell, 79 Lane, Christina, 7, 21
Index 165
Leavis, Q.D., 130 Morace, Robert, 70–1

Lee, Hermione, 26 Morton, Samantha, 63, 65
Legally Blonde (Luketic, 2001), 83 Morvern Callar (Ramsay, 2002), 17,
Leigh, Mike, 65 51–2, 63–7, 67–74, 77, 142, 146,
Lemmons, Kasi, 139 150(n)
Little Women (Alcott, 1868/9), 82–9, Morvern Callar (Warner, 1996), 63–4,
90 68–72
Little Women (Armstrong, 1994), 6, mothers/motherhood, 17, 24–6,
9, 17, 42, 80–2, 82–92, 105 29–30, 32 34, 50 72–3, 82–6,
Loach, Ken, 65 87–8, 92, 93, 96, 99–100,
Looser, Devoney, 118–20 106–10, 144
Lost in Austen (Zeff, 2008), 113–14, mother-daughter, 17, 24, 26, 29,
133 32, 91, 92, 100–1, 106, 108,
Lowry, Hunt, 105 111–12
Luce, Claire Boothe, 107 and black women, 143–5
Lynch, Deirdre, 115–16, 128 Mrs. Dalloway (Gorris, 1997), 6
Munford, Rebecca, 30–1
Mansfield Park (Austen, 1814), 20, 43 My Brilliant Career (Armstrong,
Mansfield Park (Rozema, 1999), 6, 1979), 15
17, 20, 36–41, 41–7, 81, 84, 86, My Brilliant Career (Franklin, 1901),
129, 150(n) 15
Marcus, Jane, 28
Martin, Darnell, 7, 139 Negra, Diane, 9–10, 79, 118, 120,
marriage, 37, 40, 53, 59, 63, 91, 95, 124, 127
96, 98–9, 100, 102, 104–5, 112, neoliberalism, 114, 126, 133, 138
128 Napoleon Dynamite (Hess, 2004),
matriarchal/matrilineal, see also 130
mother-daughter, 23–4, 26, 27, Northanger Abbey (McDermid, 2014),
29, 86, 87, 143 118
Masood, Paula, 139–40 Now and Then (Glatter, 1995), 85
McDermid, Val, 118
McElya, Micki, 144 Orlando (Potter, 1992), 6, 9, 17,
McHugh, Kathleen, 22, 74 20–2, 22–7, 27–32, 32–6, 37,
McRobbie, Angela, 8–9, 120–3, 43, 51, 71, 74, 81, 84, 148(n),
127–8, 131–2, 148(n) 149(n), 150(n)
Mean Girls (Waters, 2004), 83 Orlando (Woolf, 1928), 6, 20, 30,
Meltzer, François, 13 32–6, 149(n), 150(n)
Meyers, Stephanie, 117 Otto, Whitney, 91
Midler, Bette, 105 Ouditt, Sharon, 33
Miller, Nancy, 3–4, 68, 78, 150(n)
Miss Congeniality (Donald Petrie, Palahniuk, Chuck, 105, 151
2000), 108 Palme d’Or, see awards
Mitchell, Elvis, 66 patriarchy/patriarchal, 13, 19, 20,
Modleski, Tania, 120 29, 34, 36, 46, 74–5, 76, 77, 78,
Monaghan, David, 40 86, 87, 90, 99, 100, 123, 142
Moore, Susanna, 75 paternity/paternal, 20
Moorhouse, Jocelyn, 50 Park, Ida May, 19
166 Index
Persuasion (Austen, 1818), 125, 138 Sanders, Hannah, 79

Persuasion (Mitchell, 1995), 38 Sarris, Andrew, 136, 149
Portrait of a Lady, The (Campion, Scents and Sensibility (Brough, 2011),
1997), 6, 22, 39, 45 117
postfeminism, 8–10 Scholtz, Anne-Marie, 39, 45, 90
and black women, 134 Scream (Craven, 1996), 83, 100
and lesbian women, 134 Secret Life of Bees, The
postfeminist media, 18, 21, 39, (Prince-Bythewood, 2008), 17,
79, 81, 82, 114, 116, 117, 118, 18, 139–47
119, 124, 133, 152(n5) Sense and Sensibility (Lee, 1995), 6,
postfeminist context, 2, 6–10, 16, 38, 39, 44, 83, 90
18, 27, 50, 91, 114, 131, 147 sexuality
postfeminist politics, 18, 80, 82, heteronormative/heterosexual,
90, 95, 100, 114–15, 118, 119, 46, 51, 58, 79, 82, 90, 95, 100,
120–5, 127, 128, 129, 133, 103–4, 105, 117, 118, 125, 132,
134, 135–6, 138, 146, 148(n5), 134, 152(n2)
151(n3) lesbian, 17, 46, 95, 127, 132, 134
and subjectivity, 15, 79, 109, 114, Showalter, Elaine, 24, 29–30, 94
129, 130, 131–2, 146 Shreve, Anita, 52
and whiteness, 10, 79, 81, 82, 87, Silver, Brenda, 29
109, 112, 134, 138, 140 Silverman, Kaja, 4, 16, 77
Potter, Sally, 3, 6, 9, 17, 19–22, Silverstein, Melissa, 19, 148(n)
22–7, 27–32, 32–6, 37, 43, 47–8, sisterhood, 9, 17, 29, 31, 79–82, 85,
149(n), 150(n) 86, 88–9, 92–3, 94, 96, 97, 104,
Practical Magic (Dunne, 1998), 91 105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 112,
Pretty Woman (Marshall, 1990), 7, 21 128, 142, 143, 151(n1), 151(n2)
Pride and Prejudice (Austen, 1813), Sklar, Robert, 160
113, 114, 133–4 Sleeping With the Enemy (Ruben,
Pride and Prejudice (BBC, 1995), 38, 1991), 7
39, 130 Sleepless in Seattle (Ephron, 1993), 7
Pride and Prejudice (Black, 2003), 117 Spencer, Liese, 93
Prince-Bythewood, Gina, 18, 139, Stables, Kate, 145
140, 143–6 Stam, Robert, 4, 10–12
Prison Song (Martin, 2001), 139 Steenkamp, Elzette, 119
Projansky, Sarah, 82 Swicord, Robin, 83–5, 88, 90, 116
P.S. I Love You (LaGravenese, 2007), 8
Pulver, Andrew, 88 Talk To Me (Lemmons, 2008), 139
Tannen, Ricki Stefanie, 69–71
Ramsay, Lynne, 63–5, 70, 73, 146 Tasker, Yvonne, 9–10, 51, 79–80, 85,
Ratcatcher (Ramsay, 1999), 65 108, 118
Rich, B. Ruby, 5, 149(n) Thelma and Louise (Scott, 1991), 7,
Ridout, Alice, 134 39, 105
romance, 8, 40, 51, 74, 82, 88, 90, Thompson, Emma, 90
91, 95, 96, 106, 115, 118, 125, Thornham, Sue, 3, 15, 55, 57–9, 60,
130, 132, 136 62, 69, 73–4, 77
Rozema, Patricia, 17, 19–22, 28, Titanic (Cameron, 1997), 83, 100
36–41, 41–48, 144–5 To the Lighthouse (Woolf, 1927), 74–5
Index 167
Travis, Trysh, 105–6 Weinstein, Harvey, 39

trickster, 69–71 Wells, Rebecca, 105, 152(n)
Williams, Linda Ruth, 65, 73
Vanity Fair (Nair, 2004), 6 Winch, Alison, 79
Vidal, Belén, 22, 37, 42 Wings of the Dove, The (Softley,
Voiret, Martine, 119 1997), 39
Women, The (Clare Luce Booth,
Waiting to Exhale (Whitaker, 1995), 1936), 107
91, 140–1 woman’s/women’s film, 6–7, 8, 18,
Warner, Alan, 63–4 80, 82, 93, 106
Washington Square (Holland, 2011), women filmmakers, see authorship
6, 39 Woolf, Virginia, 2, 9, 17, 19, 20, 22,
Watkins, Susan, 28 24–7, 28–32, 32–6, 41, 47–8, 59,
Weight of Water, The (Bigelow, 2000), 74, 84, 149(n), 150(n)
17, 51, 52, 52–5, 56–9, 59–61, Wuthering Heights (Arnold, 2011), 6
61–3, 67–70, 76–7, 142
Weight of Water, The (Shreve, 1998), Zacharek, Stephanie, 161
52, 55, 59–62 Zwerdling, Alex, 30

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Adaptation, Authorship, and Contemporary Women

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Introduction: Agency, Adaptation, and Authorship 1

This book examines contemporary film adaptations directed by

that these films are adaptations inevitably complicates the representa-

Women’s authorship and cinema

Virginia Woolf is famously (mis)quoted as saying, ‘For most of history,

it remains important, it seems to me, to explore in terms of femi-

I am also concerned with analysing films that ‘bear the signature of

of the value of studying women’s film authorship while recognizing

Polemics for women’s creativity are fine as long as we realise

filmmakers had to find new provisions for making and exhibiting

The postfeminist context

In her article ‘From Female Friends to Literary Ladies: The Contem-

from the first big cycle of women’s melodramas in the early

With feminism as part of the academic curriculum (i.e., ‘canon-

women … as one of potential where a lively dialogue about how

However, as McRobbie goes on to show, the contentious possibilities

Postfeminism broadly encompasses a set of assumptions, widely

In their anthology Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics

of feminism’s redundancy is the context in which three female

Adaptation as conversation and collaboration

It is my contention in this book that adaptations can be particularly

It is a model that privileges a multiplicity of voices in and between

meaning-making of texts. It makes room in the analysis of adapta-

to express one’s ideas, thoughts, opinions, even feelings, and the

dialogism entails a view of the individual and, by extension,

The filmmaker’s position in relation to larger culture is dialogical;

that DeBona considers in his focus on adaptations of the classical

Western notions of individualistic (literary) authorship are sus-

To counter the patriarchal tendencies of both literary and film

Laird’s model does not have to be limited to instances in which

what is required for a feminist theory of translation is a practice

Collaboration in adaptation, then, removes authorship from fidel-

The numerous models and metaphors that appear in collaborative

Certainly, the metaphor of conversation is not exclusive to a feminist

The figure of the woman author

In her book A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon argues that ‘adap-

adaptations is appealing for women filmmakers and that the main

Directed, scripted and produced by women, My Brilliant Career is a

The structure of the book

their generic identities would be classified as popular films; in other

films’ key production roles. These women’s films made by women

As I noted in the introduction, the early 1990s was a period

Sally Potter’s Orlando

media and disciplines by considering it through Virginia Woolf’s

Both Woolf and Potter use the mother-daughter metaphor, which

focus of early film studies) and the marginalization of the few

Another turn to the process of thinking back through our mothers

Women filmmakers, to use Woolf’s words metaphorically, ‘have been

However, like biological mother-daughter relationships, metaphor-

Should we think through our mothers, or kill them? Must we kill

Considering the fact that, historically, women filmmakers have been

film. She describes the adaptation process, and by implication her

feminism all together (2001: 254). Hollinger and Winterhalter con-

By the early 1970s, the emerging women’s movement had made

Brenda Silver’s book Virginia Woolf: Icon develops a detailed argu-

look for the provenance of the feminist writer … mother is key …

are positioned around the ‘leaders’ of these generations, whether

That a woman might not be comfortable with the role of feminist-

Woolf, holds this process of disidentification and identification

Putting on the woman author’s body

my belief is that if we live another century or so … and have five