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European Conflict and Hollywood's Reconstruction of English Fiction

1996; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 26; Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3508640

2222-4289

Robert Lawson‐Peebles,

Cinema and Media Studies

In this essay I will discuss Hollywood versions of two 'classic' novels, Wuthering Heights and Pride and Prejudice. I want to suggest that the films recast the novels as images of a modernizing England which is learning to reject class and inherited wealth in favour of democracy and love. The films, I suggest, were engaged political texts which proposed, firstly, that 'OLD ENGLAND', the words immediately following the title sequence of Pride and Prejudice, was worth supporting; and, secondly, that such English novels were still relevant to the concerns of a contemporary American audience, even if that audience only knew them as ghostly presences adumbrated by the films' title sequences. The films were, in other words, strategies for reading nineteenth-century texts in the light of a contemporary political and military conflict.' I would like, first of all, to place the films in as precise as possible a historical context. In September 1938 the Czech crisis brought Britain to the brink of war. Newsreels showed gas-masks being distributed and air-raid trenches dug in London's parks. War was averted, albeit temporarily, by the Munich agreement between Chamberlain and Hitler. Wuthering Heights was released in the United States on 7 April I939, the day that Italy invaded Albania. Pride and Prejudice was released in the United States on 26July 1940.2 Between those two dates, the worst fears of many had been realized. Britain and France declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939 over the invasion of Poland. The German Army began the invasion of the Low Countries and France on i o May 1940, and Dunkirk was evacuated between 27 May and 4June. Armistice between Germany and France was declared on 22June 1940, and on IoJuly the Battle of Britain began.3 It had been named in advance, by Winston Churchill. In a speech to the House of