| The term "heritage film" refers to films set in the nineteenth century, usually literary adaptations. This study focuses on a set of these films by women filmmakers in the 1990s. These supposedly feminist films depict sadomasochistic relations between characters and invite sadistic and masochistic identifications from the spectator, continually negotiating a precarious feminism.; The introductory chapter places these films in a number of contexts: the cycle of adaptations that gained crossover success in the 1990s; the history of the "woman's picture" and associated debates about gendered address' debates about the definition of feminism, especially the second wave; trends in literary criticism about the adapted authors; and general theories of sadomasochism as well as psychoanalytic feminist film theories regarding sadistic and masochistic spectator positions.; The dissertation begins with Gillian Anderson's Little Women (1994) and Ang Lee and Emma Thompson's Sense and Sensibility (1995), films whose sentimentalism rests on Deleuzian mother-centered theories of masochism. The core of each film is the idealized but pathological devotion between sisters. The directors' DVD commentaries challenge but then accept the definition of tearjerkers as "girl movies." In addition, Little Women attempts to create a coherent feminist author/heroine self by conflating Alcott and Jo.; The dissertation then turns to Jane Campion's The Piano (1993) and The Portrait of a Lady (1996). Portrait , which transforms Isabel into a masochist in love with a sadistic Osmond, resembles The Piano, which casts Ada's sadomasochistic relationship as her liberation; the films thus assume a Freudian view of femininity as inherently masochistic. Both films depict the heroines as sadomasochistically split selves. Furthermore, Portrait induces the viewer to feel sadistic toward the heroine; Campion alternately identifies with a masochistic Isabel and a sadistic Henry James.; All the films discussed represent a female subjectivity in jeopardy, a self either incomplete except in conjunction with another female or divided against itself. The films also reveal the double bind of heritage films that aspire to feminism: they either appear to locate all women's oppression in the past or ahistorieize the "bad relationship" into a purely personal issue that transcends time for all women.; Keywords: Feminism, Adaptation, Heritage Films, Masochism, Sadism... |
