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Joon Hyung Park, Intertextual Dialogism with Rossetti’s Lady Lilith in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Adaptation, Volume 9, Issue 3, 1 December 2016, Pages 393–416, https://doi.org/10.1093/adaptation/apw036
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Abstract
This essay revisits Karel Reisz’s 1981 film adaptation of John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) through the shift in film adaptation studies from fidelity criticism to Robert Stam’s notion of adaptation as intertextual dialogism, which draws on Roland Barthes’s theories of text and intertextuality and Julia Kristeva’s dialogic model of intertextuality. I reinterpret the intertextuality in Reisz’s film as the amalgam of other texts and images within a larger context of cultural discourse. Concerning the ‘spirit’ of the novel that he captured and transferred to cinema as an audio–visual medium, Reisz in a 1998 interview alludes to how Fowles’s novel links ‘intellectual speculative elements’ with its ‘meta-textual’ elements through the analogy between the female protagonist Sarah and Fowles in terms of their transformations (157–58). In adapting the novel’s essence to a visual representational mode, Reisz’s film changes the novel’s metafictional devices into metacinematic ones. More significantly, transforming the characterisation of Sarah from Rossetti’s model and amanuensis to a painter, the film omits direct references to the Pre-Raphaelites and Barthes and employs images associated with vision and framing such as mirrors, windows, archways, and eyes as their equivalents. Exploring the intertextual dialogism among the four Barthesian texts—Fowles’s novel, Pinter’s screenplay, Reisz’s film, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Lady Lilith (1866–68)—I demonstrate how these images in the film not only intersect with its metacinematic elements but also have an intertextual relationship with Rossetti’s painting.
