engleski

Adaptation and Appropriation as Tailoring and Shape-Shifting: Tim Burton's Neo-Victorian Alice

Tim Burton’s much awaited Alice in Wonderland (2010) ruffled quite a few critical feathers with its fairly free, 3D take on Lewis Carroll’s eponymous classic. Instead of focusing on the problems arising from viewing the film as a loose adaptation, the paper instead investigates the film’s appropriation of the main character and key plots. Understood as the director’s and screenwriter’s (Linda Woolverton) Neo-Victorian recycling of Carroll’s Alice books both as Victorian heritage and as part of popular culture (owing to its numerous adaptations in the past), the film opens itself up to an analysis of Neo-Victorian appropriations of Victorian (con)texts for contemporary debates about female agency. The paper thus analyzes the visual symbolism of Alice’s transformations and the central role that clothes and the idea of re-fashioning play in the process. Alice’s literal and metaphorical shape-shifting and growth into an adult individual and her transformation from a tomboyish rebel against Victorian restrictions on female agency (symbolized by corset-wearing) into an imperialist entrepreneur and adventurer (reversing the Victorian gender roles in the process) is analysed in terms of her visual identity, subjectivity and agency being literally tailored and re-fashioned in front of the viewers’ eyes. Who does the tailoring, and what are the possible ideological implications of Alice’s re-fashioning, these are the questions raised by the paper in conclusion.

adaptation; appropriation; Neo-Victorian; film; costume; shape-shifting

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