Measurin

For decades, the study of film adaptation has been troubled by questions of fidelity. Too often, adaptation studies have merely compared films to their literary sources, a "tiresome" endeavor, as Dudley Andrew points Out, that inevitably privileges the literary work over what comes to be seen as its inferior film derivation (266). In reacting to a long history of uninsightful comparisons of film and literature, scholars have tended to regard the study of adaptation as a naive approach to the examination of film and to favor, instead, methods that (as the popular adage in cinema studies proclaims) treat film as film. At the same time, however, the realization that literary adaptations make up almost half of all commercial film releases has precipitated a search for ways to reconceptualize issues of adaptation. (1) One recent approach that has reinvigorated adaptation studies considers a filmmaker's relationship to his or her source within the context of film production. This new focus represents a much needed reorientation of the study of adaptations, for even if film scholars have not been eager to consider the question of fidelity, filmmakers have persistently regarded it as a major aspect of filmmaking and promotion.

Indeed, promotional materials often advertise film adaptations by lauding the degree to which they capture the essence, or voice, of their source narratives. Yet as many film scholars have demonstrated, a literary work never simply reappears on the screen, and a critical distinction must be made between "those narrative features that can be transferred from one medium to another and those that can't" (MacFarlane 9). Of the stock formal devices of narrative frequently called upon to present a text faithfully on film, perhaps a novel's most elemental, yet elusive feature is authorial voice. In an adaptation, a filmmaker necessarily mixes the verbal with the visual, perhaps hoping to capture the novel's crucial essence, the authorial timbre of the original. But because an author's voice is often understood only as a hovering presence throughout a text, it is the formal quality that challenges translation into the film medium most fully.

Perhaps this problem of capturing a disembodied authorial voice may shed light on the related issue of locating authorial identity at all. For embedded in the concept of capturing a novel's essence is the bugbear of delineating an authoritative textual meaning, a concept that seems to equate a novel's narrative voice with the author's intention. As post-structuralist theory demonstrates, however, defining authorial intention often reveals more about the interpretive predispositions of a reader than about the author's narrative designs. In film, the challenge of capturing an authorial voice is even further complicated because a filmmaker often adapts a source from an historically distant era, and the problem becomes one of transposing a presence removed by time and place. In light of these exegetical complexities, the concept of fidelity--naively understood as a one-to-one mapping on of a novel to film--must be reconceived to account for (what Bakhtin might term) a film's historical heteroglossia. (2) Measurin g a film's fidelity to the narrative voice of its source thus becomes a way to uncover a filmmaker's biases in regard to her or his source text, as well as the social contexts of both works.

Identifying the recent proliferation of film adaptations from historically distant novels as a "return of the classics" movement, Timothy Corrigan argues that fidelity to their sources is not the reason such adaptations are so popular. He suggests, instead, that this "return of the classics" reflects a conservative reaction against trends of postmodernist filmmaking that diminish traditional plot and character. This movement embodies, he claims, "a therapeutic turn from cultural complexity" and "an increasing concern with manner over matter" (72). Although the idyllic past envisioned in these films may never have existed, even when the source texts were written, its filmic embodiments present a fantasy of a time when life was simpler, offering escape and solace to world-weary contemporary viewers. What Corrigan does not recognize is that this movement, which he seems all-too-eager to condemn, also involves substantial input from female filmmakers. Oftentimes, these filmmakers, whose films are to a large exte nt directed to a female audience, report that they are greatly concerned with issues of fidelity.

Many current classic adaptations represent attempts by female screenwriters, directors, and production executives to recapture for contemporary women the distinctive voices of prominent female literary figures of the past, either real or fictional. Films like Orlando (Potter, 1993), Little Women (Armstrong, 1994), Sense and Sensibility (Lee, 1995), Clueless (Heckerling, 1995), The Portrait of a Lady (Campion, 1996), Mrs. Dalloway (Gorris, 1997), Washington Square (Holland, 1997), and Mansfield Park (Rozema, 1999) are all adapted by female screenwriters, and often female directors and producers as well, from novels written by female authors and/or focusing on female protagonists. If these films are nostalgic attempts to escape from current "cultural complexity," their transpositions of their source texts also reveal that this past is one dominated by female figures who are framed by a contemporary female sensibility for a contemporary female audience that (as the box office success of these films suggests) is eager to hear not just voices from a past literary era, but women's voices in particular.

An interesting example of this "return of the classics" movement is Sally Potter's 1993 adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando. Avant garde filmmaker Potter's first mainstream success, the film was an enormous hit, especially in Britain, where it reached the number one box office spot, even overtaking American blockbusters that tend to dominate the British market. Woolf's Orlando is an unusual choice of source material for Potter because it has not held the same classic status as Woolf's better known novels, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. In fact, the film's success as a "classic" must in part be attributed to the status Woolf herself has come to hold as a cultural icon, for the novel has only recently, if at all, come into vogue. Yet Potter, as well as her star Tilda Swinton, has commented extensively in interviews on her fascination with Woolf's text and on the rigors of her adaptation process. Further, she has maintained repeatedly that hers is, without question, a "faithful adaptation," true to its source, if not in all of its particulars, certainly in maintaining its "essence," "core," "spirit," or "voice."

As many critics remind us, however, the question of adapting a work's essence to the screen is a vexed one that always involves a subjective judgment of what that essence actually is. (3) Given Woolf's biographer/narrator's comments in the text of Orlando noting the impossibility of making up "the whole boundary and circumference of a living person" from "hints dropped here and there," it is remarkable that Potter aims to piece together a single textual core at all (74). To pinpoint a core in the novel, Potter must muffle a superintending narrative voice that repeatedly cautions about the elusive shimmering of singular essences. This voice might remind Potter that from among Orlando's "many thousand selves" only a few may be present at any given moment to be captured on film (Orlando 309), making Potter's conviction of her film's fidelity to its source oddly discordant with Woolf's deconstructive narration. Throughout the novel, Woolf's narrator is skeptical about objectivity and repeatedly dismantles the pos sibility of a stable meaning. This rhetorical device places the narrator's doubt about the existence of a spiritual core itself as one of Orlando's central thematic concerns. Exploring the "silver dregs in the bottom of her net," Woolf's narrator sees meaning as little more than a curious residue of language and questions her ability to label "rightly or wrongly" anything that constitutes "the real self' of Orlando. Finally, she sighs that "the great fish" of the essence of things "who lives in the coral groves" will never be caught, although one "fling[s] words after it like nets" (313-14).

Yet Potter is certain she has caught "the great fish" that is the essence of Orlando, in spite of the fact that, as she admits, she has flung "nets" of changes at her source material. As Potter sees it, an "adaptation that is slavish to a text is doomed to a sort of literary stultification" (qtd. in MacDonald 212). In order to "stay true to what [she] loved in the book, and enable it to work as a film," Potter felt justified in making what she describes as "ruthless changes" (Potter ix). According to Potter, all her alterations were part of a "central drive [...] towards the central meaning of the book," based on extensive research into "anything pertaining to Orlando" (x), and intended "to eliminate the unnecessary and saturate with meaning what remained" (xv). Yet not all the film's reviewers would agree that Potter even begins to approximate Woolf's text. Interestingly enough, as Brenda Silver points out, Orlando was denounced as unfaithful to Woolf's novel by both conservative and liberal commentators ali ke. Conservatives John Simon in The National Review and Stanley Kauffman in The New Republic both saw Potter as having doomed her project to inevitable failure by taking on the hopeless task of adapting a novel that is essentially unadaptable, whereas feminists Jane Marcus in The Women's Review of Books and Robin Morgan in Ms. saw Potter's film as a "disastrous," "gratuitous," and "desecrat[ing]" violation of Woolf s text (qtd. in Silver 227-28).

Potter's changes are, without question, extensive and involve alterations in plot, narration, and, despite her claims to the contrary, thematic content. In terms of plot, Potter refashions both the narrative's beginning and its ending. Rather than open with Orlando rehearsing for manhood by slashing with a sword at a hanging Moor's head, as he does in the novel, Potter introduces him reading a book of poetry, standing beneath the oak tree that serves as his inspiration. Rather than adhere to Woolf's ending, that shows Orlando calling for her absent husband as she sees what she believes is his airplane in the sky, Potter has Orlando return to the oak tree and declare her final happiness directly to the audience. Between these two scenes in both novel and film, Orlando experiences a gender change. Whereas the novel leaves this change tacitly prompted by Orlando's recognition of history's imbrication of masculinity and warfare, the film locates the cause of this transformation specifically within the carnage of the battle scenes he witnesses in Turkey. Further, in the film Orlando gives birth, not to a male heir as she does in the novel, but to a daughter, and as a result, loses Knole, her ancestral estate.

In addition to these extensive alterations in plot, Potter also alters the effect of Woolf s narration by casting a woman, Tilda Swinton, as both Orlando's male and female incarnations. Woolf makes it clear in her opening sentence that "there could be no doubt" about Orlando's initial masculinity (Orlando 13). Yet Potter casts Swinton, who is transparently female, as the male Orlando, redirecting the significance of the novel's introductory claims about his indisputable maleness. When Woolf's narrator assures us of Orlando's sex, the testimonial voice insinuates the very doubt it purports to dispel; in so doing, she creates a meta-narrative voice that invites readers to watch as identity is produced by the language used to describe stereotypically gendered behaviors. In the film, however, the gender-dismantling initiated in this aside loses its deconstructive edge and, because Swinton is clearly masquerading as a male, becomes obvious parody or comedic Shakespearian cross-dressing. We no longer question how t he construct of masculinity is produced, but only whether Swinton can fill the male role.

According to Potter, even these bold changes in plot and narration do not precipitate major alterations in the novel's thematic structure. Her interview comments indicate that what she holds to be the novel's spirit or essence is, in fact, her interpretation of its theme. While Potter has identified her central thematic concerns variously as "about female experience" (qtd. in MacDonald 213), "a celebration of impermanence," "the mutability of all things and relationships" (Potter xv), and a "bitingly ironic [...] view of the English class system and the colonialist attitudes arising from it" (qtd. in Hankins 170), most often she has focused on her interpretation of Woolf s concept of androgyny, claiming it represents the core of both novel and film. She seems convinced that her presentation of Orlando captures perfectly Woolf s androgynous hero, who, according to Potter, embarks on a quest for "the essential self [...,] the immortal soul" (qtd. in Degli-Espostil 89). But given the degree to which Woolf's conc ept of androgyny is itself fraught with critical debate, (4) one might well question whether the search for the essential self is, in fact, the core of Orlando.

Woolf's conception of androgyny is neither as explicit nor as simple as Potter maintains. Indeed, it has been a decidedly problematic concept for feminist critics who, like Potter, claim Woolf as the grandam of feminist foremothers. Potter describes her idea of androgyny, embodied in the figure of Orlando, as the belief "that all this masculinity/femininity stuff is really a dressing up of an essential self. They're identities you can choose or not choose" (qtd. in Silver 283). In this sense, she echoes the sentiments of Woolf's narrator, who reflects upon the social trappings of gender identity that "perhaps it is the clothes that wear us, not we who wear them"(Orlando 187-88). But Potter goes on to elucidate her conception of the essential self as a "human essence, a transcendent sense of being which goes beyond gender or the property line, inheritance and so forth, that these are in a sense masks or irrelevancies" illustrating the "blurring of sexual identity and nonsense of masculinity and femininity as constructs" (qtd. in Degli-Esposti 89). Here, Potter gives Woolf's notions about clothing and the social performances that constitute gender identity new significance; she moves beyond Woolf s critique of gender as a social costume and expounds her own program for transcending gender.

Whereas Potter pins down Woolf s idea of androgyny to a single interpretation, critics have pointed to its multiple layers of embedded meaning. Some have even questioned the benefits for women of accepting Woolf's androgynous ideal at all. Elaine Showwalter, for example, has argued that the androgyne's marriage of the male and female merely subsumes what may have traditionally been associated with women under male characteristics (282-86). Thus, while producing an ameliorated male, Woolf still perpetuates the subordination of female qualities to male dominion. Other critics have pointed out that Orlando stands as a companion piece to Woolf's series of lectures on "Women and Fiction," that were collected and published just one year after Orlando as A Room of One's Own. In the later text, Woolf elaborates her theory of androgyny by discussing her conception of the great literary mind within both aesthetic and historical contexts. Moreover, as Brenda Silver points out, if we are mindful of the circumstances tha t surround Woolf s composition of the two works, the figure of Orlando can be seen as the fictional embodiment of the androgynous self Woolf unfolds more discursively in A Room (224).

An important aspect of Woolf's argument for androgyny insists that writers should shun consciousness of their own sex when they write because pressures to conform to social gender roles create barriers that are "fatal" to creativity (A Room 74). For Woolf, the psyche is composed of two parts, one male and the other female, and only when the two come into balance is the mind able to produce art. Woolf's choice of the word "fatal" is particularly important for an understanding of the high premium she places on androgyny. Awareness of one's gender had just become literally "fatal" for many in her generation when what Woolf saw as hyper-masculinity had dangerously run amuck in the militarism of World War I. Her use of the word "fatal" explicitly ties images of artistic death to scenes of "unmitigated masculinity" falling in line with "fascist boots" marching across European battlefields (103). In this light, Orlando should not be viewed merely as a male character who is afforded a few moments (or years) as a wom an so that he can spy out an essential femaleness buried within him. Instead, Woolf should be seen as using Orlando's androgyny to dismantle a socially-constructed male gender role, forged, in part, for imperial, military, and economic purposes. As Sandra Gilbert points out in "Costumes of the Mind," the shocking affiliation of masculinity with violence and fatality that emerges in the novel's opening, as Orlando hacks at the Moor's head, demonstrates the pacifist imperative that underpins Woolf's call for a redefinition of gender roles (391-417).

Other critics, especially gay and lesbian theorists, regard Woolf's concept of androgyny in an even more revolutionary light. They see it as foreshadowing the recent work of queer theorist Judith Butler. Butler argues for the idea of gender as performance, but not, as in Potter's interpretation, as a performance that masks an essential self. For Butler, and arguably for Woolf as well, there is no essential self, only a multiplicity of selves and genders--the thousands among which we select. Thus, the figure of the androgyne "undoes the desire for sameness," acts as a "deconstruction of binaries," and makes possible multiple genders and sexualities (Silver 224). A highly subversive concept, it leads to a "vision of a discordantly multiple, experimental, and activist queer world," criticizes "the ideological norms that police sexual/gender behavior," and "provide[s] the space for disruption, risk, or change" (233). By contrast, Potter's idea of an essential self hidden behind sexual identity and gender constru ctions acts not to subvert, but to support the sexual status quo by "subsum[ing] the body into an androgynous mind/self that is beyond politics: a manifestation of the postfeminist refrain that we don't need feminism anymore, that we have transcended it just as we have transcended gender difference because women have achieved their goals" (223).

Thus, Potter's figure of the androgyne is much less likely than Woolf's sexually ambiguous hero to stimulate thinking that could lead to social change. That Potter celebrates rather than deconstructs the idea of an immutable essential humanness leads her to the rather benign cliche she herself has proposed as her film's theme: "If there's a message, it's that underneath exteriors, men and women are probably more similar than different" (qtd. in Dobson 23). Essentially moralizing about the image of the androgyne, Potter translates what is a complicated issue for Woolf into a fable of liberation for a world of postfeminist Woolfians. This fable of liberation does not portray gender as a problematic, elastic site of cultural forces, but rather as a prison that may be escaped if one reaches nongender-specific qualities buried deep within the self.

Potter reduces the subversive potential of Woolf's representation of the androgyne in yet another way. She forcefully suppresses the lesbian subtext in Woolf's novel. Although Woolf notes in a letter to Vita Sackville-West (asking if she would mind if "Orlando turned out to be" Vita) that, while in Orlando "Sapphism is to be suggested, satire is to be the main note--satire and wildness" (Letters 3:13), she nevertheless makes it clear that the suggestion of Sapphism is crucial to her. While Potter may have felt justified in suppressing the lesbian elements in the text based upon the belief that Woolf regards Sapphism as a secondary concern, in so doing she misses the social importance that surrounded the idea of "suggesting" Sapphism at all in Woolf's day. As Adam Parks points out when he situates the composition of Orlando within the historical context of Radcliff Hall's obscenity trial for The Well of Loneliness, the suggestions Woolf makes about Sapphism are a deliberate rhetorical strategy on her part. Sh e knows that to discuss issues of sexuality directly "would be to blunt those fine edges" of the social policing of behavior her narrator seeks to make alive (8).

By tracing the revisions of the "Chloe liked Olivia" segment from early versions of A Room, Parks demonstrates that Woolf was keenly aware of her society's prohibitions against openly expressed lesbian attachments. He argues that Woolf carefully monitored her discussion of same-sex relationships, hoping to recreate in this passage a sense of her public's resistance to discussing such matters. Her reasons for doing so, Parks maintains, were twofold. First, she was afraid that a puerile fascination with things sexual would upstage the larger scope of the woman-to-woman relationships she wanted to emphasize. Therefore, in her revised text of A Room, she excised the lines that openly state that the two women shared a bed, preferring instead to leave such images to rhetorical innuendo. In so doing, she reached her second goal, to expose the mindset of those who conceive of women's bonds only in sexualized terms (7-9). Because Woolf wanted to discuss a whole range of relationships among women, she was deeply conce rned about what Sackville-West termed the "suppressed randiness" in fiction (318), for she understood the power of such "odious subjects" on readers' conceptions of women's attachments (Orlando 139). Although her affair with Vita was the central relationship for Woolf in her forties, she hoped to move Orlando beyond the biographical details of Vita's life, a strategy prompting Vita's son, Nigel Nicholson, to call the novel "the longest and most charming love letter in literature" (202). She wanted to explore not only the personal effects of woman-to-woman bonds, but also the social attitudes that superintend lesbian relationships.

Rather than leave this undercurrent of Sapphic desire as a radical force that threatens to break through the polite surface of the text, Potter altogether eliminates the "suggestiveness" of Woolf s lesbian silences. Whereas Woolf leaves a blank space at the bottom of the page to suggest between Orlando and her male lover, Shelmerdine, a sexual experience that is only vaguely gendered and that language would adulterate (Woolf, Orlando 253), Potter explicitly fashions a heterosexual love scene. In a highly stylized landscape of intertwined male and female bodies, human forms drenched in candle light and marked as distinct by virtue of the visible difference in their skin tones create a heterosexual union that becomes one of the film's key scenes.

In interviews, Potter, in fact, makes it clear that rather than following Woolf in building a critique of sexuality around Sapphism's suggestiveness, she felt that in the film the figure of lesbianism was actually to be avoided. According to Swinton, both she and Potter saw this aspect of the novel as "a hindrance" (West and West 19). As Potter says, "the film takes several steps away from the book" in this area, and these steps, as Anne Cieko argues, convert Woolf's suggestion of "an ambiguous, ambivalent, transgressive sexuality" into a "less threatening androgyny" that presents Orlando as a humanist rather than a bisexual hero (2324). Potter's attitude toward lesbianism seems based on her own limited conception of gay and lesbian politics. For her, it involves "people hav[ing] to hoist their sexuality up a flagpole to claim their identity" (qtd. in Silver 233). Similarly, she identifies lesbian cinema with "lesbian chic" and expresses a fear that being seen as a lesbian text would trivialize her film (Han kins 180). Overall, her attitude appears to be culled from a one-dimensional understanding of lesbianism as merely a question of sexual practice, a definition that dismisses lesbianism as a political identity and a public position.

In fact, Potter evidences the mindset that Woolf wanted to expose in Orlando. The social tendency to equate one's identity with one's sexual orientation alone was an extremely oppressive phenomenon for Woolf. For instance, in a letter to Vita enlisting her views on the censorship of Hall's The Well of Loneliness, Woolf expressly did not ask Vita for her signature on a petition of protest "for [Vita's] proclivities [were] too well known" (qtd. in Lee 519). Woolf s rationale was that Vita's signature was too readily identified with her sexual practices to be politically useful. But, as noted above, partially to pique awareness of the silence surrounding issues of sexual orientation, Woolf fashioned suggestive rhetorical moments in both Orlando and A Room to demonstrate the ubiquity of censorship concerning the subject. These moments read like invitations to share Woolf s narrators' inner thoughts and expose the socially sanctioned taboos against speaking what one knows to be true. For instance, Orlando's narra tor whispers:

it cannot be denied that when women get together--but hist--they are always careful to see that the doors are shut and that not a word of it gets into print. All they desire is--but hist again--is that not a man's step on the stair? [. . .] what can we suppose women do when they seek Out each other's society? (Orlando 219)

Similarly, in A Room, while it may be inferred that Chloe and Olivia shared a bed, Woolf's narrator deliberately censors herself, making her emphasis fall on the unspeakability of the women's relationship, rather than on their sexuality. After confessing that she has been fumbling with the pages of their story, the narrator demurs that the two women shared "only a laboratory," suggesting that it is as threatening for men to hear this fact as it is to know that they shared a bed. Thus, Woolf consistently presents lesbianism as monitored by omissions, silences and substitutions, exposing exactly why women make certain that "the doors are shut" (Orlando 219) and there are "no men present" (A Room 81) when they speak of their relationships.

Leslie K. Hankins presents an insightful analysis of the film's censorship of the lesbian subtext in Woolf's novel. For Hankins, Potter reinscribes heterosexuality as the dominant presence in the film by eliminating the female Orlando's many women friends and lovers, and suppressing Woolf's farcical, highly ironic treatment of Orlando's relationship with Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire (whose name itself is not immune to Woolf's parody). In scenes remarkable for their pictorial beauty, the masculine "Shel," as portrayed by Billy Zane, emerges as the great love of Orlando's life, replacing Sasha, who in the novel remains throughout the female love Orlando can never forget (175-76). Potter thus substitutes images of heterosexual sexuality for Woolf's hints of lesbianism and implies, as Hankins points out, that in mainstream cinema "it's all right to change sex, as long as you end up with a heterosexual couple between the sheets" (176).

Given these major alterations from novel to film, Potter's claims of adherence to Woolf's text highlight the underlying question of what exactly is at stake for her in claiming textual fidelity. Certainly, affiliating one's film with the prestige of its source author's literary reputation is a well-established promotional strategy, but Potter's determination to make a connection with Woolf seems to go beyond a search for prestige. Potter claims, in fact, to have established during the course of completing her adaptation an intimate connection with Woolf. She even sees this process as an "attempt to think [her]self into Virginia Woolf's consciousness" and to imagine what Woolf would have written had she lived in 1992, when Potter completed the film (xiii). Indeed, we see in Potter's unfailing determination to make the film the extraordinary durability of this tug toward mind-melding with Woolf. Her completed screenplay was rejected by nearly every producer in Britain and was only made after eight years of str uggle when Potter finally secured financial backing from a European co-production fund composed of Italian, Dutch, French, and British sources. Given the odds stacked against her, when Potter turned to Woolf, she must have had more than the commercial success of her film in mind. It seems she looked to Woolf, as Bette London suggests so many feminists do, as a favorite cultural icon, the "maternal figure through whom feminist criticism turns out mirror images of itself" (17-18). Woolf becomes for Potter exactly this kind of mirror. Believing all the while that she is entering Woolf's consciousness, Potter transforms Woolf into a figure capable of serving her own interpretive ends.

Potter's claims to have achieved a blurring of identities with Woolf no doubt served several crucial purposes for her project. First, the concept of blurred identities surrounds the film to a remarkable degree. Not only does Potter feel she was able "to think herself into Woolf's consciousness," she also describes the film itself as "not so much about gaining identity as it is blurring identity" (qtd. in Degli-Esposti 89). The film also merges national identities in its financing and genres in its combination of historical costume drama with avant-garde flimmaking techniques. A merging of identities also seems to have existed between Potter and her star, Tilda Swinton, who felt such a close relationship with her director that she all but claims co-authorship of the film. In interviews, Swinton repeatedly refers to "we," meaning apparently she and Potter, in describing creative decisions concerning the film. Most notably, she emphasizes their collaborative discovery of the film's use of direct address to the camera, a technical device Swinton claims to have used in all of her previous films and to have suggested to Potter for Orlando (West and West 21).

Direct address is the strongest single element Potter employs to inscribe this blurring of identities within her film. She uses it as the primary device through which to merge her identity, through the figure of Swinton as Orlando, with Woolf herself. Although critics have made extraordinary claims for the radical nature of Potter's use of this technique, it is after all not that uncommon in the sphere of avant-garde cinema from which Potter has emerged. Swinton herself has characterized it as Brechtian and as "subverting the idea of being gazed upon as a woman" (West and West 21). Taking this suggestion a step further, critics Scott MacDonald and Cristinia Degli-Esposti characterize the technique as "virtually revolutionary" in mainstream film (MacDonald 190). MacDonald calls it "a remarkable gesture" that "defeats the whole debate about the male gaze" by creating a new kind of viewer:

By creating the illusion of an unusually intimate relationship between Orlando and the audience, Potter has found a novel and effective way of responding to the debate about the "exploitive, voyeuristic male gaze" that has been so important in film studies since Laura Mulvey published her "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema": our personal intimacy with Orlando causes us to experience him/her, not as an object to be gazed at, but as a complex, sensual friend with whom we empathize, especially during moments of personal disappointment or happiness and during episodes where Orlando-as-woman is the victim of gender discrimination by male-oriented British society. (190)

Similarly, Degli-Esposti sees the technique as part of Potter's "excessive, neobaroque style which tries to rewrite the art of filmmaking" by destroying not only the male gaze but also the traditional mainstream "transcendent vision," "the spectator-subject's identification with the camera as a point of a sure and central embracing view" (79, 83).

In addition, Orlando's mode of direct address can be said to establish her as the author of the text, a prerogative traditionally awarded to men, and to bring to the screen an "interesting codification of Woolf's stream of consciousness [. . .] that not only explores the possibility of converting a literary expedient into a cinematic one [. . . but also] creates a new space for the discourse of spectatorship and inveigles the viewer into the making of the text itself" (Degli-Espositi 78). In this light, Potter's use of direct address takes us into the complex layering of narrative modes and the blurring of the distinction between artist and artistic product that we find in Woolf's text. Looking directly at the camera, Swinton reminds us that everything we are seeing is an illusion trapped on celluloid, just as Woolf's narrator repeatedly calls our attention to the gearwork of language in the text by both relating Orlando's life and commenting on the challenge of relating it.

Potter's use of direct address can also be seen to reinscribe, against Potter's stated intentions, the novel's lesbian subtext into the film. As Hankins argues, Orlando's direct address to the viewer and her accompanying look at the camera create "conspiratorial lesbian exchanges which challenge the heterosexual veneer of the film" (177). The technique creates a situation between spectator and character that replicates Chris Straayer's conception of the lesbian look, that in contradistinction to the male gaze requires "a returning look, not just a receiving look," and associates female subjectivity with equality, reciprocity, and activity (10). Hankins points out that although neither Swinton nor Potter currently identifies herself as lesbian, Potter's rehearsal technique actually created a situation that allows for this lesbian exchange and its extension to the viewing audience. As Potter describes her method of scene preparation, "One of the ways we worked in rehearsal was to have Tilda address those speec hes directly to me, to get the feeling of an intimate, absolutely one-to-one connection, and then to transfer that kind of address into the lens" (qtd. in Hankins 177). In this way, in spite of herself, Potter enacted Woolf s notion that woman-to-woman exchanges are multifaceted and lesbianism is not restricted solely to images of physical sexuality.

Yet Potter's intentions in developing the direct address technique appear to be far less revolutionary than critics have claimed. She did not intend to create Brechtian distanciation, but simply audience identification. She wanted the blur of identities between spectator and protagonist to allow for a greater empathetic audience response to an aristocratic character, who Potter feared would otherwise be somewhat alienating. As Potter describes the technique, she saw it as "a golden thread" connecting the audience to the character in a particularly intimate way (MacDonald 190). She also claims to have used it as a narrative device "to convert Virginia Woolf's literary wit into cinematic humor [. . . so] that in this way the spectacle and the spectator would become one through the release of laughter" (Potter, "Introduction" xiii). This rendering of Orlando as a witty authorial figure, a rendering supported by her characterization as a writer within the text, serves to blur identities in another direction that Potter may not have envisioned. Because Swinton addressed Potter during the process of filming, Orlando speaks to us in the film not only through Swinton, but also through what Potter terms "the intimate absolutely one-to-one" projection of Swinton's voice through Potter. When Swinton performs Orlando, Potter superintends her expressions and becomes a figure on the margins of the film. Taking on a role much like that Virginia Woolf, the writer, assumes in her novel, she becomes the authorial voice that hovers about her creation. In this way, Potter succeeds again in blending her consciousness with that of her source author.

Given the radical alterations we have already noted in Potter's adaptation, it seems essential to ask at this point, Whose Woolf is it that Potter actually becomes? Partly, her phenomenal blurring of identities suggests that an unusual sense of empathetic attachment to Woolf developed as Potter adapted Orlando. It also seems that Woolf herself, as much as her novel, became the source text for Potter's film. The real question of fidelity, then, is not the degree to which Potter captured the essence of Woolf s novel, but what Woolf represents for Potter as an inspirational and liberatory figure. In making the film, Potter may have been writing a biography, but it is one in which Woolf, rather than Orlando or Vita, is the focus. The film's direct address to the audience comes to speak as much of Potter's needs and wishes in turning to Woolf as of her artistic aim of fidelity to Orlando.

This extraordinary sense of empathy with a female source author by a female film adaptor may not be as unusual as it might at first seem. If it can be argued that women readers develop a particularly strong sense of empathy with female literary characters and through them with female authors, as Judith Kegan Gardiner suggests, then it would seem a logical extension of this theory to propose that female film adapters, who, after all, are also readers of their source texts, commonly feel a deep sense of connection with both the female characters and the authors of their literary sources. Potter's blurring of the boundaries between herself, Swinton, Orlando, and Woolf enacts exactly the type of emotional transference that Gardiner suggests female readers often experience in their encounters with texts that focus on female characters and that are authored by women. According to Gardiner, female readers relate to these texts through empathic bonds of idealizing, mirroring, and twinship transferences. In so doing, they replicate the early semiotic attachment to the mother, a bond essential to the daughter's formation of a sense of self. It is just this sort of semiotic attachment that critics Bette London and Brenda Silver place as the explanatory basis for why Woolf has come to be held as such a grand maternal figure for contemporary women readers and feminist critics (London 12; Silver, "What's Woolf" 55).

This recreation of the early mother-daughter bond would have been of particular importance to Potter at the time in her career when she made Orlando because she was then experiencing a period of creative turmoil. Originally a dancer and choreographer, Potter first established herself as a major filmmaker in 1979 with her featurette Thriller. The film's deconstruction of Puccini's La Boheme and Hitchcock's Psycho from the female perspective, exposing the gender and class politics of both texts, quickly gained it a reputation as a classic of the feminist avant-garde. Potter then went on in 1983 to direct her first feature film, the BFI production The Gold Diggers, staffing Julie Christie. Her hopes for mainstream success for this "elaborate plotless exploration of capitalism and the romantic iconography of women" quickly evaporated when the film was savagely attacked by reviewers, who found Potter's experimental style incomprehensible and used the film as a launching pad for an assault on government funding of the avant-garde (Ehrenstein 2).

Potter admits to having been devastated by the failure of The Gold Diggers. She seems to have had high hopes for its wide appeal to vastly different audiences and to have blamed herself when it did not meet her expectations: "I have had to make an effort not to be overtly critical about it myself, although in the privacy of my heart I am, because it failed to do what I hoped it would do. I wanted people to be able to engage it on the most complex and subtle level if they wished, or at the surface level of sheer intoxication of the senses" (qtd. in Ehrenstein 4). After that devastating failure, Potter retreated into television comedy and documentary filmmaking. As she describes it, her situation was desperate: "But the reaction to The Gold Diggers made me feel seriously in danger of not being able to do my life's work. And I'm somebody who is on earth to do my life's work. The real possibility that I wouldn't be able to proceed took me into a state of almost unbearable frustration and despair. When I tried to get things started, one door after another was slammed in my face: 'Oh, she's the one who made The Gold Diggers"' (qtd. in MacDonald 208). She did not make another major feature film until Orlando, nine years later.

Perhaps in turning to Woolf, a foremother who also suffered terribly from anxiety over the reception of her work, Potter found a place to confront her own conflicted relationship to her feminist past. In discussing the appeal Orlando held for her as a source of artistic inspiration, Potter takes pains to dissociate herself from her feminist roots and to place her film within a postfeminist climate. Rejecting the idea that Orlando should in any way be seen as a feminist statement, she characterizes the term feminist as a "debased word" and proposes that "people usually use it to categorize or ghettoize or write off, really, a whole area of thinking" (qtd. in Dowell 17). Interestingly, Potter's reflections repeat some of Woolf's own reservations about popularized forms of feminism in her own day. For instance, Woolf was so anxious about the reception of A Room that she fretted in her diary: "I shall be attacked for a feminist and hinted at for a sapphist" (Diary, 23 Oct. 1929,262). Woolf's anxiety concerning th ese associations becomes clearer if we bear in mind that she had little respect for the violent tactics of many suffrage fighters and for what she perceived as the feminist theatrics of the Pankhurst sisters because she felt they borrowed from masculine models of domination. (5) Yet, in spite of her distrust of popularized manifestations of feminist politics, Woolf never separated herself from the feminist platform. Although her friend E. M. Forster cautioned her when she wrote the "cantankerous Three Guineas" nearly ten years after Orlando that feminism was nearly outdated (23-24), Woolf never accepted the notion that oppression via gender had ended, nor that we had achieved a heightened state of awareness and transcended to a postfeminist promised land.

Potter's (mis)representation of Woolf's concept of androgyny, however, allows her to skirt such discernments and offers her instead passage out of a feminist and into a postfeminist ideological position. By baldly dissociating herself from feminism in making Orlando, Potter seems to have believed she could gain the wider audience she failed to attract to The Gold Diggers. For instance, in describing Orlando she insists, "I think the film is for both men and women, and it's about celebrating, really both sexes" (qtd. in Dowell 17). Yet by also claiming fidelity to Woolf, Potter manages to cloak her divorce from feminism under an assertion of loyalty to her feminist roots. As Brenda Silver concludes, Potter's determination to read Woolf as "subsum[ing] the body into an androgynous mind/self that is beyond politics" presents Woolf as an early manifestation of the postfeminist refrain that "we don't need feminism anymore" because women have transcended gender difference and reached their goals (233). It casts her as having accepted Forster's claim that feminism is a thing of the past. Interestingly, then, Potter's conception of fidelity to Woolf not only assuaged her possible guilt as a result of her rejection of feminism, but also ventriloquized this rejection into the voice she claims she hears in Woolf. Her commitment to "fidelity" allows her to end Orlando on a postfeminist note not found in Woolf's text, and then to propose that this postfeminism is actually what Woolf would have adopted herself had she been alive today.

Potter admits that writing the film's ending posed her greatest screenwriting difficulties. She claims to have rewritten it "hundreds of times" (Florence 282) and to have read everything Woolf wrote after Orlando to get a sense of how Woolf would have revised her novel's conclusion had she written the screenplay herself (Potter, "Introduction" xii-xiii). Potter's conclusion, however, contrasts sharply with the views Woolf puts forth in A Room, Three Guineas, The Years, and Between the Acts, all written after Orlando. In each of these works it is clear that Woolf believed women must continue to strive to break the patterns of gender oppression in society. But Woolf's plea for a continuing feminist diligence is perhaps most succinctly expressed in A Room, where she describes the "work" that awaits women if they wish to prevent society's drowning of female creativity. She introduces the figure of Shakespeare's sister, Judith, who killed herself centuries ago because the world would not allow her to create artist ically, and who is still waiting to be reborn. While claiming that society is still too impeded by strict definitions of gender for Judith to become fully alive, Woolf asks us to rally around her nevertheless, for

[s]he lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives, for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences [...] Shakespeare's sister will put on the body she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners [...;] she will be born [...;] she will come if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty and obscurity, is worth while. (A Room 113-14)

Potter's conception of a postfeminist world of gender equality seems to ignore this "work" Woolf insists still needs to be done. Instead of calling on us to strive for Orlando's birthright, Potter envisions a world where gender is no longer an obstacle to fulfilling one's "life's work," a work that perhaps, as a result of her movement to postfeminism, Potter now hopes will be fulfilled in her own life.

To reach her postfeminist promised land of complete gender equality, Potter has to make radical changes in the novel's ending. First, she alters the sex of Orlando's child from male to female. This child, whom Orlando carries through explicit scenes of the trench warfare of World War I, becomes a visible sign, as Orlando runs forward pregnant on the battlefield, that she is moving out of the militaristic male world. Woolf, on the other hand, wanted to emphasize that the gendered structure of society is deeply implicated in the perpetuation of war across history. In giving Orlando a male child, she shows that so long as sons ascend to positions of cultural power there is little hope that the specific moments of destruction in history will disappear. But in giving birth to a female child, the film's Orlando loses Knole, her ancestral estate, and rather than continuing the male military pageantry of the past, the land is now free of such patterns of domination. As Jane Marcus describes it, this substitution all ows Potter to project Orlando and her daughter into an "idyllic green women's world" ("A Tale" 11), one where the child (who is actually played by Potter's niece) frolics in the grass with a video camera. Sitting pensively under the same oak tree as in the opening sequence, Orlando sees what appears to be a vision of a singing angel in the sky. Asked by her daughter, who now (like Potter) holds the lens of women's creativity in her hands, why she is sad, Orlando looks directly into the camera and announces in the film's final shot, "I'm not. I'm happy."

This utopian ending allows Potter to add what she believes to be a sharper class critique to her film than is found in the novel. As many critics have noted, Woolf herself was ambivalent in her attitude toward her aristocratic protagonist. Hankins, for instance, suggests that "Woolf s ostensible tribute to her aristocrat was also a subtle indictment" (172). Being wealthy herself, Woolf "was both aware of and critical of her own mixed feelings about the aristocracy. She held in dialectical tension the roles of cultural inheritor and outsider, combining nostalgia for the very institutions she critiqued with radical commitment to outsider status and to revolutionary change" (Hankins 170-71). Potter, however, has interpreted Orlando as devoid of such ambivalence toward class privilege and the systems of economic gain that bankrolled the forces of the British empire. She seems to have accepted the common notion, propagated, as Marcus suggests, mainly in Britain, that Woolf is an upper class snob, the "class enemy " (12). As a result, Potter takes full credit for adding a class critique to the film, one that is greatly facilitated by the creation of an ending that has Orlando lose Knole in diametrical opposition to Woolf s design in the novel. Potter describes her decision in this way: "I tried to restore Orlando on film to a view more consistently detached and bitingly ironic in its view of the English class system and the colonialist attitudes arising from it" (qtd. in Hankins 170).

By the film's close, then, Potter may have "done Orlando," but she has done it in a voice of her own. She not only ignores Woolf's own critique of elitism in the novel, but her movement from questions of gender to class at her conclusion also shatters Woolf's feminist critique of male privilege. She replaces this critique with a celebration of Orlando as finally "emerging from the shackles of the property-owning classes, emerging simply as a human being in her own right" (Dowell 17). This change effectively overrides Woolf's warning at the end of her novel that male power is still at large as a destructive force in the world. The birth of Orlando's male heir in the novel is a sure sign that the history of destruction supplying the backdrop for Orlando's life will be perpetuated unless gender identities are continuously challenged. Yet Potter's postfeminist message that gender is no longer an issue and that women and men are the same under their clothes shifts the focus from the dangers of male dominance to th e harmony that can be found if we concentrate on undressing the essential self beyond gender.

Of course, there is no reason Potter should not be free to perform her own Orlando, but we want to make the tacit political dimensions of her revision explicit. One of the problems with Potter's changes is that in excising Woolf s restoration of Knole to Orlando, she gives the impression that woman's only "inheritance" and her path to her "true self" is through motherhood, symbolized by Orlando's blissful relationship with her female child. Potter's sentiments, as with so many postfeminist ideas, can easily be appropriated by the political right, and, in this case, particularly by their campaign for women's role in protecting family values. As Pat Dowell comments,

Less clear to me, however, is why Orlando, a being so clearly headed for a life outside the normal parameters, longs for a child, especially in this age of family values, when the political right wing has staged a full-court press to convince men and women how much they want to parent. [...] The idea that love and sex do not necessarily entail reproduction (and vice versa) is at the heart of the right's panic-stricken hostility to feminism and homosexuality. (37)

Potter's attempt to enlarge the novel's class critique by altering its ending is questionable in another way. As Hankins suggests, "the final vision of Tilda Swinton as Orlando in the film remains thoroughly aristocratic. Her retro-chic clothing, her style, and the absence of any visible means of support suggest the upper class assumptions which belied the film's trumpeted politics" (170). In the process of adapting with "fidelity," then, Potter sacrifices, rather than enlarges, Woolf's voice of social consciousness about class privilege. The film fails to become the bitingly satiric view of the class system that Potter intended, but almost seems "to cherish [its hero], while making only facetious gestures about repudiating the system" (172).

The utopian aspects of Potter's ending are troubling for other reasons as well. As Potter herself comments, the novel ends on a "metaphysical note [...] with Orlando caught somewhere between heaven and earth, in a place of ecstatic communion with the present" ("Introduction" xiv). While Potter may believe she recaptures this mood of liberatory celebration at her film's conclusion, there are crucial differences between the two endings. Whereas Woolf's conclusion remains entirely open with a sense of an unknowable future as Orlando looks to the sky unsure of what she sees, Potter adds much more closure. Potter's Orlando does not see the symbol of an unknowable future when she looks to the sky, but an angel singing of a future that really has already arrived. Picking up on this utopian vision, critics have seen Potter's conclusion as suggestive of an end both to patriarchy and to women's "spiritual self search through time" (West and West 19; Degli-Esposti 90).

Additionally, by concluding with Orlando's daughter looking at her mother through the lens of a video camera, Potter implies that at the beginning of "a new discourse for the act of viewing and creativity, Orlando is now the object of the look of her daughter's camera. The look of the little girl offers the possibility of a new and different perspective." This perspective places a woman in the role of "the authoritative central figure of the narrative, a position, and a privilege that has been traditionally masculine" (Degli-Esposti 90). The utopian future of gender equality is not only "coming" as the final song's lyrics suggest, it sings in the here and now. Glittering and camp, Woolf's oppressive "angel in the house" (6) is transformed into Potter's triumphant angel of women's liberation from constricting gender norms, a highly romanticized image of completion. Women are imagined, in Potter's work, to have come into their rightful inheritance "in an atmosphere of transcendent celebration" (qtd. in Dowell 1 7).

In the singing of angels, then, Potter achieves a kind of triumph over the work Woolf calls upon women to continue in order to bring about the birth of Shakespeare's sister. Although the angel's song predicts a future tense birth, in the image of Orlando's girl-child, Potter suggests that this birth has already occurred and that we have achieved a perfect postfeminist moment of female liberation into the realm of the essential self. Whether it suggests the right wing's reinscription of the mother's "natural desire" for a child or the postfeminist image of a world where women are now free to hold the camera, Potter's Orlando is a fable of completion, where fulfillment and harmony are established through a perfect ordering (or reordering) of events. In reinforcing her commitment to this ending, the notion of fidelity to her source text serves Potter both psychologically and ideologically. The voice she hears as she claims fidelity to Woolf not only assuages her guilt for abandoning her earlier feminism, but als o validates her newfound postfeminist sense of liberation by tracing its origins back to a feminist foremother. In this way, Potter assumes the position so often taken by postfeminists that their views are not anti-feminist, but that they, in fact, have succeeded in subsuming feminism within their broader perspective. In the context of Orlando's production and reception, however, the voice that claims fidelity speaks so emphatically it gives its doubts away.

Notes

(1.) Two recent volumes of collected essays devoted to this reconceptualization are Cartmell and Whelehan and Naremore.

(2.) As Bakhtin defines the term in The Dialogic Imagination, heteroglossia refers to the base condition that governs the operation of meaning in a textual utterance. It insures the primacy of context over text. At any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions--social, historical, physiological--that will insure the language produced will have meaning that reflects these conditions and that may very well be in excess of an author's stated intentions (26).

(3.) For excellent recent discussions of this problem see, for instance, Imelda Whelehan, "Adaptations: The Contemporary Dilemmas," in Cartmell and Whelehan, 3-19, and James Naremore, "Introduction: Film and the Reign of Adaptation," in Naremore, 1-16.

(4.) For discussions of the debates in feminist theory surrounding Woolf's concept of androgyny, see Moi, 8-18.

(5.) In her diary (vol. 3), Woolf records her impressions of the women who fought for women's suffrage. She finds them insufferable because, as she puts it, "None were eloquent; and yet they had to beat up a froth." Woolf goes on to characterize women who follow male models for political reform as lacking in vision; they are unable to think outside of binaries. Because their ideas lack the promise of breaking male/female binary divisions and of envisioning new gender roles, Woolf is "unable to listen to a word these women say" (125). For a fuller discussion of critical attitudes concerning militant feminists that prevailed among early twentieth-century women writers, see Marcus, "Corpus/Corps/Corpse: Writing the Body in/at War."

(6.) In "Professions for Women," Woolf borrows the popular figure of "the angel in the house" from Coventry Patmore's nineteenth-century verse sequence of the same title. Patmore recounts the courtship and marriage of Honoria, a girl whose self-sacrificing grace, gentleness, simplicity, and goodness earn her the distinction of being not only a pattern Victorian lady, but almost literally an angel on earth. Woolf argues that women must "kill" this "angel" because it encourages their self-abnegating domestic subordination. Women must destroy this model of domestic servitude in order to assert their right to meaningful and fulfilling work outside the home.

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Karen Hollinger (hollinka@mail.armstrong.edu) is an associate professor of film and literature at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, Georgia. She is the author of In the Company of Women: Contemporary Female Friendship Films (University of Minnesota, 1998) and co-editor with Virginia Wright Wexman of Letter from an Unknown Woman (Rutgers Films in Print Series, 1986). She has published widely on representations of women in film and literature and is currently working on a book-length study of contemporary film adaptations of classic women's fiction.

Teresa Winterhalter (winterte@mail.armstrong.edu) is an associate professor of Victorian and twentieth-century British literature at Armstrong Atlantic State University. She has published several articles on Charlotte Bronte and Woolf, emphasizing the relationship between narrative technique and the representation of women.

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