Is The Representation Of Women On Screen Challenged Or Reinforced Cultural Attitudes Towards Female Paranoia?

GOLDSMITHS UNIVERSITY BA (ENGLISH LITERATURE AND DRAMA)

To what extent has the representation of women on screen challenged or reinforced prevailing cultural attitudes towards female paranoia and hysteria?

A case study using film adaptations of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.

1. Introduction

2. Visual Doublings in Le Memorie di una Istitutrice

3. Jane Eyre in the 1940’s

4. The Female Gaze and the Modern Jane Eyre

5. Conclusion

1. Introduction

The representation of women in cinema has been extensively analysed among feminist film theorists, and they explore the various ways in which women are categorised and objectified on screen. Feminist film critics such as Anneke Smelik observe

In an extensive search to try and locate the film, I conversed with Bryony Dixon from the BFI (British Film Institute) who informed me that Woman and Wife had been falsely titled and it was in fact Ricardo Tolentino’s Italian silent film Le Memorie di una Istitutrice (1917) that was stored in the BFI archives. Filmed on 35mm reel this adaptation has a total playing time of twenty-five minutes, although in Karen Laird’s study on adapted Victorian literature, she notes the original film has a running time of 77 minutes. The adaptation is the only surviving silent film of Jane Eyre and is closely aligned with Vaudeville-style theatre, illustrated in the stage-like setting and melodramatic acting style. Laird argues that ‘adaptations often incorporate salient cultural concerns of their own historical moment into the dramatic elements of the stories they reconstruct, and the 1910’s was a decade dominated by the disruptions created by World War I.’ There is very little information on the making or reception of Tolentino’s film. However, Laird notes ‘the Jane Eyre adaptations of the late 1910’s can be understood as early examples of the woman’s film.’ Laird goes on to state that ‘the cycle of wartime adaptations illustrates rapidly changing gender constructions, both in terms of the ways that women’s roles

In critiquing the power of vision in Jane Eyre Peter J. Bellis notes that ‘sexual and social power is visual power’ and he acknowledges that ‘the struggle between Jane and Rochester is embodied in a conflict between two different modes of vision: a penetrating male gaze and a marginal female perception that would conceal or withhold itself from the male.’ The struggle for power through Rochester’s “penetrating” and Jane’s “marginal” gaze is transformed on to the screen visually through the camera’s alignment with Rochester. In Ann Kaplan’s now classic study Is the Gaze Male? Kaplan writes, ‘the objectification of women is not symmetrical, men do not simply look; their gaze carries with it the power of action and of possession that is lacking in the female gaze. Women receive and return a gaze but cannot act on it.’ In Le Memorie di una Istitutrice, Rochester’s active gaze continually objectifies and interrogates Jane. Laird argues that ‘the film is obsessed with Jane (and in turn, the implied female spectator) as a voyeur, and the scenes that she lingers over seem to intensify her barely suppressed desires.’ Jane (played by Valentina Frascaroli) is both doe-eyed and attractive and, as Laird notes, ‘she represents the feminine ideal of her generation.’ When Brontë’s novel was published, Jane Eyre was in no way the ‘feminine