The Woman in White, some BSG recs, and statistics
You know, I've yet to encounter a version of The Woman in White, except for a German tv miniseries, which does not change one crucial plot element. (The Woman in White, dear readers, is a Victorian mystery/thriller written by Charles Dickens' pal Wilkie Collins, the Thomas Harris of his day, who was a rather unorthodox gentleman living with two
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They changed that? I don't consider it so hard to understand, especially if the audience is *told* the gentleman would lose his status, his property and his money to a legitimate heir (no matter how distant, or to the Crown/government). That seems reason enough for motivation.
In these productions with the substitution of a rape - is this rape a witnessed thing? I mean, a servant's word against a gentleman in those days - the gentleman could easily destroy the character of his accuser in public.
I don't know if this was true or common practice, but Michael Crichton in The Great Train Robbery made mention of male sufferers of sexual diseases searching out virgins since having sex with a virgin was a spurious cure for those ailments. The scene in the book had a young but experienced prostitute selling her 'virginity' to a gentleman in need of a cure. (The movie substituted Leslie Ann Down's character for this act, which did not even near completion. Nor ( ... )
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In these productions with the substitution of a rape - is this rape a witnessed thing? I mean, a servant's word against a gentleman in those days - the gentleman could easily destroy the character of his accuser in public.Exactly! One of the film versions (the one with the 12, 13 years old Anne raped as backstory) had her writing about it and depositing the pages in the late Mrs. Fairlie's coffin (as a substitution for the church registry proving Glyde was illegitimate, plot-wise, for the showdown). The ALW musical had Anne raped at age 16 and pregnant, but neither case provided a witness other than herself, in which case, as I said above, Sir Percival would never have worried ( ... )
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If Anne *hadn't* been a servant, if she'd been, say, a relative of the next-in-line (young wife?). But then it wouldn't be Collins' story, even if the accuser had the status to back up her allegations and make them a hard threat. (Would a society woman break silence, though?)
The history buff thing. I've never seen a production of Pride and Prejudice that *didn't* have the entailed estate mentioned, meaning that the sisters would be destitute once their father died. That seems to work there; people recognize the dilemma.
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Fosco is wonderful. I was sorry to read that the current musical treats him merely as a comic turn.
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Fosco in the musical: I've just listened to it, not seen it on stage, so of course I'm not 100% sure, but he's not just comic relief. He's still the man with the plan, and the sparring with Marian is good. Still, the stunning ruthlessness and horrid implications of what he's capable of does not come across as vividly as the comic elements, plus he's short of a wife. (Which helps reduce the darker side of Fosco, as the subdued Countess serves to illustrate the nice witty Italian man isn't as harmless as he seems from the get-go.)
My problem with the musical is rather that it's not very inventive musically. There is just one song that amounts to something, Marian's "All for Laura", and that's not in the Don't cry for me, Argentina or Music of the Night class. Fosco and Marian have always the same melody and variations of same in their encounters, which gets old, and the other characters are musically indistiguishable from another.
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Fosco's account of Anne's death: well, I never thought that the "the poor dear was better off dead anyway, and it offered such a splendid opportunity to switch her with Laura without actually killing Laura" wasn't self-serving. For one thing, Fosco loves showing off his inventiveness, for another, the confession was written for Marian and he has an interest in demonstrating he did something for her (i.e. not kill her sister). This being said, I also think the bones of the matter - i.e. the Anne/Laura switch being Fosco's idea - are true, because Sir Percival wasn't bright enough to think of it, and Laura alive gave Fosco an ace if he ever needed something of his own to hold over Glyde (remember, he never learns the secret). Mind you, what they did to Laura was ghastly enough. I remember having nightmares about being locked up in a madhouse ( ... )
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Anyway - I browsed through Sutherland's book once and thought it amusing in parts, but no more than that. I think I missed the WiW parts because I looked up Jane herself, being much of the "Rochester is a cad and fleeced Bertha Mason of her inheritence" persuasion anyway. But then, Wide Saragossa Sea said so many years earlier...
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As I'm working on representations of the victorian age on television I am obviously quite intrigued!!
I read The Woman in White years ago as a teenager and loved it, then reread it a few years ago and realised that unlike some other novels it had stood the test of growing up... I still adore it. :) That said, I actually really liked the British tv adaptation - not because I was so incredibly impressed by the rewriting of Sir Percival Glyde's secret, but because I think that visually it's very very beautiful, not in a merchant ivory, but instead in a very thoughtful kind of way. It was possible to 'read' the representation of an age and it's presence in film / tv through the adaptation's mise-en-scene...
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True, the looks of the British productions were very atmospheric. And I liked Simon Callow as Fosco and Tara Last-name-escapes me as Marian.
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Same thing with the first season of Farscape here. Every first season episode was missing five minutes, which I always found really strange since it was a SciFi series, like this show is, and SciFi was more worried about adding extra commercials than airing their own series in their entirety! I had to wait for the DVDs to see the missing parts.
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