The Cinematic Eighteenth Century

History, Culture, and Adaptation

Srividhya Swaminathan, Steven W. Thomas, Srividhya Swaminathan, Steven W. Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351800945
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria del periodo medievale e dei primordi dell'età moderna

This collection explores how film and television depict the complex and diverse milieu of the eighteenth century as a literary, historical, and cultural space. Topics range from adaptations of Austen's Sense and Sensibility and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe ( The Martian) to historical fiction on the subjects of slavery ( Belle ), piracy ( Crossbones and Black Sails ), monarchy ( The Madness of King George and The Libertine ), print culture ( Blackadder and National Treasure ), and the role of women ( Marie Antoinette, The Duchess, and Outlander ). This interdisciplinary collection draws from film theory and literary theory to discuss how film and television allows for critical re-visioning as well as revising of the cultural concepts in literary and extra-literary writing about the historical period.

1 Fashionable Failures

Ghosting Female Desires on the Big Screen

Ula Lukszo Klein

The costume film is as much about fantasy as it is about history, and historical costume dramas often represent a certain fantasy of history. In the post-third-wave feminist, twenty-first-century moment, the larger-than-life stories of two women in particular have become fodder for contemporary women’s fantasies of history. The French queen, Marie Antoinette, and her contemporary (and friend) Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire, had their lives brought to the screen in three different films in the last decade. Two of these films, Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film Marie Antoinette¹ and Saul Dibb’s 2008 film The Duchess,² illustrate the lives of these high-born, fashionable, and influential eighteenth-century women in strikingly similar ways—focusing on their youth and innocence, their lack of sexual satisfaction in marriage, the pressure to produce a male heir, and their interests in fashion and extravagant hairstyles. Both films were also based on acclaimed biographies that became popular best-sellers.³ Benoȋt Jacquot 2012 French-language film Les adieux à la reine, or Farewell, My Queen,⁴ by contrast, is based on a novel⁵ and focuses on just one week in the life of Marie Antoinette. Nevertheless, it also echoes many of the same motifs as Coppola’s film. All three films illustrate a “feminine” version of history that Samiha Matin characterizes as an essential characteristic of costume films, which “give primacy not just to romance but also to female protagonists while highlighting the visual drama of private life through costume and interiors.”⁶ Further, these films offer modern female viewers the fantasy of being able to enter into, understand, and empathize with historical figures who appear not as “queens” or “duchesses” but as women who face the same problems as all women. In these ways, the films under discussion here are typical of the costume film genre.

The fantasy that these films offer is, by and large, a heterosexual one. This fact is not unusual, except that in two out of these three films, lesbian desires are explicitly depicted on screen. In Farewell, My Queen, they are even alluded to in the film’s promotional materials. These desires function to titillate the viewers while highlighting the lack of fulfillment these notable women experienced in other realms of their lives. Sapphic feelings or relationships between the central figures and their closest female friends are by turns ignored, as in Marie Antoinette; presented as a stepping stone to heterosexual passions, as in The Duchess; or depicted as impossible, as in Farewell, My Queen. In different ways, each film completes the pattern by which mainstream culture, in the words of Terry Castle, “ghosts” the lesbian:

When it comes to lesbians … many people have trouble seeing what’s in front of them. The lesbian remains a kind of “ghost effect” in the cinema world of modern life: elusive, vaporous, difficult to spot—even when she is there, in plain view, mortal and magnificent, at the center of the screen.⁷

Such a ghosting is not surprising given the prevalence of this trend in mainstream biographies and biopics. What is notable, however, is the way that these films, and the works they are based on, first mention or include same-sex desires, only to then decisively ghost them. Two of these films portray lesbian desires on screen overtly, marking a change from early Hollywood depictions of powerful women such as Queen Christina (1933) and Marie Antoinette (1938), yet neither Farewell, My Queen nor The Duchess manages to engage critically with these desires.⁸ In a parallel movement, all three films hold out the possibility of self-fashioning female identity through clothing and coiffure, while at the same time suggesting how these women of the past went too far in embracing style over substance. Consequently, the assertion of an independent female subjectivity, like lesbian desires, remains illusory. The women’s ghostliness becomes the lens through which the modern viewer is invited to empathize with them at the same moment that it becomes the defining, and therefore limiting, way to understand them.

In ghosting Marie Antoinette and Georgiana Cavendish and simultaneously attempting to make these women and their desires seem relevant and contemporary, these films obscure and over-simplify the history of women. The focus on partying, gaming, and fashion covers up various other histories, not just that of lesbianism, in the eighteenth century.⁹ The facts that both Marie Antoinette and Georgiana wrote poetry, were active in politics, and had a variety of male and female friends, including one another, are notably omitted from these films. Instead, the films offer the viewer authentic scenery and props in a movement common to many period films.¹⁰ Marie Antoinette and Farewell, My Queen received accolades for filming on location at the Palace of Versailles, which, as New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis writes of Benoȋt’s film, “deepens the period verisimilitude.”¹¹ The issue of verisimilitude is only of interest so far as the material aspects of the film are concerned, and each film dutifully recreates the fashions, interiors, and exteriors that are shorthand for historical accuracy and therefore realism.¹² The central problem of the costume film becomes the assertion of modern heterosexual female individuality. This problem is represented as timeless, and while the queen and the duchess must appear regal and aristocratic, they are also rendered generically female and quintessentially modern.

This notion of the generic and the individual is perhaps where the problem of lesbian representation lies in these films, as filmmakers still struggle with how to represent female same-sex desires as sympathetic or even as historical possibility. The problematic issue of historical speculation or representation is one that many queer scholars have grappled with; as George Haggerty puts it, “What can historians of sexuality accomplish without the keyhole testimonies that prove our subjects had sex with members of their own gender?”¹³ The burden of proof is often very high for historians of queer sexuality, and thus we must “look elsewhere in almost every case. That is why the circumstantial case often becomes the more revealing one.”¹⁴ Historians and filmmakers without the incentive or interest to look at the circumstantial evidence as a productive possibility for lesbian representation end up working hard to dispel the taint of homosexuality around their subjects even as they insist on alluding to and then rejecting same-sex desires. The consistent rejection of reciprocal female same-sex desires suggests the continuing cultural disbelief in the reality of the lesbian. In the following pages, I demonstrate how each film ghosts female homosexuality, or even its possibility, using fashion in order to construct and deconstruct female (and lesbian) identity and shared subjectivities. Despite critical wariness of the use of the word “lesbian” for pre-1900 sexual identities, many critics of eighteenth-century literature use the term critically and effectively.¹⁵ In my discussion, I use the term “lesbian” in order to encompass Adrienne Rich’s broad, far-reaching notion of the lesbian continuum, female same-sex relationships both friendly and romantic, as well as the more specific term denoting a woman who prefers romantic and sexual relationships with other women.¹⁶ I do this in order to highlight the ways in which these films refuse the possibility of passionate female same-sex relationships, even as they offer viewers a tantalizing peek at the historical lesbian.

Marie Antoinette

Sofia Coppola’s film, while reviled by many critics for its seeming deference to style over substance, has provided ample material for feminist analysis since its release. Feminist film critics, as well as critics of fashion studies, have lauded the film for its ability to draw attention to issues of female subjectivity, identity construction, and female empowerment.¹⁷ The film begins with the arrival of Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) at the French court of Versailles, fast forwarding through 29 years all the way to the day she and Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman) are forced to leave the palace after the storming of the Bastille. The film merges spectacular visuals of royal life with an anachronistic soundtrack, interspersed with moments of intense loneliness and isolation for the young queen within the impersonal, over-decorated walls of the palace (Figure 1.1). By the end, Coppola’s point is clear: the queen was just a girl awkwardly fighting against losing her identity in the face of overwhelming court strictures and scrutiny. This narrative motif is directly adapted from Antonia Fraser’s 2001 biography Marie Antoinette: The Journey. The film’s and biography’s argument is that Marie Antoinette was herself oppressed by the gossip and crushing isolation of being an outsider to the French court. As several feminist critics have noted, the film exposes the queen’s oppression through the focus on her body, the spectacularization of it, and Marie Antoinette’s own attempts at regaining power over her body and, by extension, her image.¹⁸

Coppola’s focus on Marie Antoinette as both a lonely, alienated outsider and a fun-loving fashion icon has been read by many critics as a way of putting contemporary women’s issues at the forefront of the film. Anna Backman Rogers argues that “the film recuperates the figure of Marie Antoinette from the annals of history; instead of the Marie Antoinette of myth, the viewer is offered a portrait of a young woman in extreme crisis who is divested of her identity.”¹⁹ This identity is then created, in the film, via fashion, according to critics like Pamela Flores and Diana Diamond. Fashion and female creativity become outlets through which to fight against patriarchal oppression of the upper-class female, and we watch together as “Marie Antoinette decides to express her freedom; and she writes her liberty on her dressed and adorned body.”²⁰ The film encourages female viewers to identify with the idea that we too use clothing to escape the criticisms against us, as modern women, to fashion a new identity and assert our freedom.

Even as her fashionable excesses were a source of criticism, the historical Marie Antoinette was an influential fashion icon of her time, and her fashions often served political ends. Caroline Weber points out that many of the extravagant parties and costumes in the early years at court were designed by the queen specifically to distract the court from “her underlying political woes.”²¹ Material culture at court played an extremely important role for the queen both personally and politically. The real queen manipulated her image early on, posing on horseback in male clothes so that “her authority began to be respected and she began to be imitated.”²² The film, however, suggests that fashion—like food and partying—was more of a hobby than a political ploy for the queen, something to take her mind off her husband’s lack of interest in sex and her lack of friends and allies at court.²³ The scenes in which the queen “shops” for new fabrics and shoes with her friends the Duchesse de Polignac (Rose Byrne) and the Princesse de Lamballe (Mary Nighy) focus much more on the candies, pastries, and champagne that the women consume while shopping rather than the shopping itself. Shopping and food emblematize the mindless consumption the queen used to distract herself from the overwhelming isolation of Versailles.

The film illustrates how this sense of isolation and alienation the queen experiences at Versailles leads her to distract herself with food, fashion, partying, and even an (heterosexual) affair. Each of these pleasures passes into the distance in Coppola’s film, and the friendships the queen strikes up with the duchesse and the princesse are revealed to us only in fragments and montages. Historically, these women were the queen’s closest friends and allies, and many of the scandalous libelles targeted their friendships, highlighting their important real-life role in Marie Antoinette’s life. Coppola’s film includes the scandalous libelles that circulated at the time of the Revolution but omits the pamphlets that describe the queen’s special favoritism for the Duchesse de Polignac or the Princesse de Lamballe.²⁴ Further, these important relationships get little meaningful screen time. In the film, her friends’ discussions of sexual gratification with men function to underscore the queen’s desperate lack of sexual satisfaction in her own life, a notion highlighted by the queen’s affair with Count Axel Fersen (Jamie Dornan). In those brief scenes, we see the queen finally enjoying sexual passion. The sapphism of the queen or even the accusations of it are ghosted in Coppola’s film in the same way that the accusations of sapphism are firmly rejected in the biography.²⁵

The film argues that we can only truly understand the queen if we understand her humanity and her struggle for individuality within the confines of her position as queen, and, implicitly, not as a lesbian or bisexual. As Matin notes,

When women’s history and the history of femininity are addressed, they become emotionalized into histories of experience. History enforced particular scenarios, locations, and protocols that give rise to distinctive emotional situations for the heroine in order ...