engleski

Postfeminist Blind Spots: Cultural Translation, Agency, and ‘Colour-Blind’ Casting in William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth (2017)

This paper examines the relationship between gender, agency and race in William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth (2017), advertised as ‘powerful portrait of a beautiful, determined and merciless young woman seizing her independence in a world dominated by men’ (DVD blurb). Despite its immediate association with Shakespeare’s heroine, Lady Macbeth is an adaptation of Nikolai Leskov’s novella, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, first published in Russian in 1865. Oldroyd’s film culturally translates and re-locates Leskov’s narrative to Victorian England, re- appropriating Leskov’s use of Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth in the process. Taking a cue from Gayatri Spivak’s seminal analysis of Jane Eyre in ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Postcolonial Reason’, the paper considers this re-location alongside the film’s radically changed ending and examines the implications of ‘colour-blind’ casting in key roles. Expanding on Christine Geraghty’s work (2020) on ‘colour-blind’ casting in recent British-made period dramas, the paper contends that Oldroyd’s reworking of Leskov’s text offers a neo-Victorian critique of the clichéd, but often overlooked, narrative arc of the white, middle- class, and implicitly imperialist, woman’s liberation from strict Victorian mores as an emancipation that has been made at the cost of the racially Othered women in the narrative.

adaptation, agency, 'colour-blind casting', feminism, gender, integrated casting, postfeminism, postcolonial, race

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