engleski

‘Why be normal?’ Clothes and the neo-Victorian queering of gender roles and family structures in film and TV

This paper analyses the visual strategies for the depiction of Victorian heroines in contemporary neo-Victorian film and TV using the character of Alice in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010) and that of Vanessa Yves in Penny Dreadful (2014- ) as case studies. While the paper argues that the dressing and undressing functions as an important aspect of the larger notions of tailoring and shape- shifting which operate as metaphors for neo- Victorian adaptation and appropriation of Victorians today, it focuses its analyses on the staging of Victorian heroines’ dressing and undressing on screen as a reflection of the postfeminist trends in contemporary media regarding the representation of women’s bodies. By closely examining the role that the concepts of transformation and re-fashioning play in these screen texts, the paper points to the gender dynamics of the heroines’ sartorial transformations where the mother figures are rejected, while the male characters perform the roles of the heroines’ father-figures as ‘tailors’ and advisors. Furthermore, this peculiar gendered bias is read as more than just an example of postfeminist representations of fraught mother-daughter relationships prevalent in contemporary cinema where mothers stand for tradition and limited gender roles for women (see, e.g. Ashby 2005): it is understood as a part of the neo-Victorian trend of queering the traditional, nuclear, family structure stereotypically understood as Victorian. In its analysis of onscreen depictions of the Victorian heroines dressing and undressing, the paper thus reveals a neo- Victorian deconstruction of the traditional notions of gender roles and family structures that questions the concepts of ‘normal’ and ‘strange’ and ultimately asks ‘why be “normal”?’

adaptation; clothes; fashioning; heroine; neo-Victorian; Victorian

nije evidentirano