Loading...
Miss Havisham’s dress: Materialising Dickens in film adaptations of Great Expectations
Regis, Amber K. Wynne, Deborah
Regis, Amber K.
Wynne, Deborah
Citations
Altmetric:
Advisors
Editors
Other Contributors
Affiliation
EPub Date
Publication Date
2012-12
Submitted Date
Collections
Files
Loading...
article
Adobe PDF, 544.59 KB
Other Titles
Abstract
This essay focuses on the neo-Victorian materialisation of Dickens’s vision through the costuming of the Miss Havisham figure in three film adaptations of Great Expectations: David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), and Alfonso Cuarón’s Great Expectations (1998), a modern updating. The distinct film language which emerges from the costume designs in each of these films enables cinema audiences to re-read and re-imagine the novel’s portrayal of perverse and uncanny femininity. As a result, the disturbing and enduring ambiguity of Havisham’s clothing establishes her as a figure of resistance to modernity, and as an embodiment of decline, signalling youth and age by means of a robe which is at once wedding gown, unfashionable garment and shroud.
Citation
Neo-Victorian Studies, 2012, 5(2), pp. 35-58
Publisher
Journal
Neo-Victorian Studies
Research Unit
DOI
PubMed ID
PubMed Central ID
Type
Article
Language
en
Description
This article was published in Neo-Victorian Studies© 2012.
Series/Report no.
ISSN
1757-9481