Miss Havisham’s dress: Materialising Dickens in film adaptations of Great Expectations
dc.contributor.author | Regis, Amber K. | * |
dc.contributor.author | Wynne, Deborah | * |
dc.date.accessioned | 2015-01-14T11:30:15Z | |
dc.date.available | 2015-01-14T11:30:15Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2012-12 | |
dc.identifier.citation | Neo-Victorian Studies, 2012, 5(2), pp. 35-58 | en |
dc.identifier.issn | 1757-9481 | |
dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10034/338229 | |
dc.description | This article was published in Neo-Victorian Studies© 2012. | en |
dc.description.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. | |
dc.language.iso | en | en |
dc.relation.url | http://www.neovictorianstudies.com | en |
dc.relation.url | http://www.neovictorianstudies.com/past_issues/5-2%202012/NVS%205-2-3%20A-Regis%20+%20D-Wynne.pdf | en |
dc.subject | ageing | en |
dc.subject | costume | en |
dc.subject | Charles Dickens | en |
dc.subject | Great Expectations | en |
dc.subject | fashion | en |
dc.subject | film adaptation | en |
dc.title | Miss Havisham’s dress: Materialising Dickens in film adaptations of Great Expectations | en |
dc.type | Article | en |
dc.contributor.department | University of Sheffield ; University of Chester | en |
dc.identifier.journal | Neo-Victorian Studies | en |
html.description.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. |