From Page to Screen / Vom Buch zum Film

Modification and Misrepresentation of Female Characters in Audiovisual Media / Veränderung und Verfälschung weiblicher Figuren in den audiovisuellen Medien

Manuel Almagro-Jiménez, Eva Parra-Membrives

• Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783823302339
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria para la literatura comparada

For a long time now, women have struggled for the vindication of their rights and for their visibility. This struggle may seem a story of success, maybe not complete or equal for all women, but at least one which slowly but surely carries with it the promise of equality for all women. However, a closer look reveals that in various fields of culture the representation of women frequently undergoes a manipulation which makes the image of women lose the intention initially attempted.This is often the case with adaptations of literary texts to thescreen, when the initial literary message is changed because of, for example, marketing demands or some ideological stance. Rarely do we find the opposite case where the indifferent or emasculated original female characters are turned into guardians and/or apologists of feminine power. The present volume focuses precisely on the way in which the image of women is modified in films and TV series, when compared with the original literary texts.

PART 1
CHILDREN’S STORIES FOR ADULTS

HEIDI GOES KAWAII1:
The Evolution of Fräulein Rottenmeier in the Animated Versions of Johanna Spyri’s Novels

Lorena Silos Ribas

At its best an adaptation on screen can re-envision a well-worn narrative for a new audience inhabiting a very different cultural environment

(Cartmell/ Whelehan, 2010: 23)

1 Introduction

Film and television adaptations of literary texts play a crucial role in the reproduction of socio-cultural values and ideologies, and they also provide a rich resource for examining how such values and ideological agendas are transmitted generation after generation (see McCallum, 2018). Indeed, as Stam points out (2000: 57), “the greater the lapse in time, the less reverence toward the source text”, and the more likely it is that the latter will be reinterpreted through the values of the present. Thus, adaptations may not only perpetuate cultural values and assumptions related to the original text, but also offer a means by which to re-interpret that text in a new sociocultural environment and reveal both the concerns of the original and those of contemporary audiences. Nonetheless, despite all alterations, an adaptation can be considered to remain faithful as long as it maintains the main ideas and values conveyed in the original adapted product (Stam, Raengo, 2005: 6), with which it is in permanent conversation.

Of interest for this volume is McCallum’s claim that adaptations of children’s literary texts usually involve “a triple shift: from book to film obviously, but also sometimes from ‘high’ literary culture to ‘popular’ (film/TV) culture (in the case of ‘classic’ texts), and often from child or adult text to ‘family’ film” (McCallum, 2018:14). The shift from “high” to “popular” may also be the reason why until roughly the 1990s research within the sphere of adaptation studies had deemed filmic versions to be of a lesser quality than their literary predecessors, with the focus mainly on finding the voids left in the process of rewriting for the screen and on foregrounding the question of (in)fidelity1. In the field of children’s literature, however, such transformations have been traditionally warmly received with abridged and censored editions being “the norm rather than the exception” (Lefebvre, 2013: 22). Indeed, within the field of literature for children, filmic versions traditionally tend to transfigure plots and ideas, and, by so doing, simplify the otherwise more intricate and socio-culturally challenging literary storylines, as is the case, for example, in the majority of classic texts adapted by Disney, which sanitize existing texts to make them palatable for family audiences, be it for financial, artistic, or ideological motivations (see, for instance, Cartmell, 2007; Lefebvre, 2013).

Since the advent of cinema, Johanna Spyri’s Heidi has been adapted for the screen numerous times, with the first of these dating back to 1920 in the form of a silent movie. In most cases, these adaptations have remained faithful to the novel and been in line with Spyri’s intention of showing the healing power of nature and the harms of authoritative education. None of them, however, have included the central religious theme that is present in the Heidi novels (see Hale, 2006), in which Heidi learns to rely on God and then helps her own grandfather to regain his faith too. Nonetheless, all adaptations preserve the moral and social implications of Spyri’s writings, albeit contextualizing them for their audiences, either by expanding their plots or else developing existing characters or by introducing new figures.

Heidi first appeared in print in the late nineteenth century when Swiss author Johanna Spyri wrote two novels recounting the story of a young orphan girl living in the Alps. Heidis Lehr- und Wanderjahre (1880)2 and Heidi kann brauchen, was es gelernt hat (1881) could be categorized as “convert and reform novels” (Usrey, 1985: 232), but they are also heirs to the Swiss pedagogical tradition, particularly to the theories of J. J. Rousseau and J. H. Pestalozzi. The central role of nature in the development of the individual is seminal in Rousseau’s writings, which depict the child as a free spirit, whose mind should be left undisturbed. And just like Spyri does in Heidi, both Rousseau and Pestalozzi chose literary representations of childhood as instruments by which to metaphorically develop an idea or theory in their writings3.

Johanna Spyri’s novels tell the story of 5-year-old Heidi. She is left to live with her grandfather in the Swiss Alps after her Aunt Dete, who has been responsible for her since the death of both Heidi’s parents, finds a good position in Frankfurt, and so she is not able to have the child under her protection anymore. Like many Swiss workers and peasants at the time, Dete has to emigrate to make a living, since poverty and hunger were widespread in 19^th century Switzerland. Due to unknown circumstances and his sorrow at having lost his son, Heidi’s grandfather, known by the rest of the villagers as Alm-Öhi, has isolated himself from society and lives by himself in a hut in the mountain. Surprisingly enough – but in accordance with Spyri’s intention to show the benefits of nature for human beings – the girl easily adapts to this new environment: she likes her grandfather and soon becomes friends with a young goatherd named Peter and grows attached to his family, most particularly to his blind grandmother. However, three years later, Dete returns and forces Heidi to join her in Frankfurt, where she is to become the companion of Clara, the daughter of the wealthy Sesemann family. Clara had lost her mother and is confined to a wheelchair. Although she is soon enthralled by Heidi’s innocence and joyful personality and her feelings are shared by her father and her grandmother, Fräulein Rottenmeier, the governess of the house, dislikes the Swiss girl and believes she cannot be a good influence on Clara. Indeed, Rottenmeier is the counterpart to Heidi: while the young protagonist supports her companion and gives her the courage and the desire to walk, to grow and to flourish, Rottenmeier figuratively cripples Clara and hinders her from improving her condition, effectively binding her to her immobility. The pedagogical component of the novels is evident from the very title of the works, whose primary objective is to educate young readers in values and attitudes through Heidi’s adventures. As mentioned before, nature has a pivotal role: the purity of life in the mountains shows the Alps as an idyllic place in contrast to Frankfurt, the city, which destroys the individual rather than sheltering him or her, with Clara in her wheelchair as a metaphor for the damage caused by supposed progress and repressive education.

The purpose of this essay is to examine how the character of Fräulein Rottenmeier has evolved in the various film adaptations of Johanna Spyri’s novels – more specifically, in the animated versions – and to make an attempt to understand the socio-political implications of such an evolution and of the alterations in the depiction of this female figure.

2 From Page to Screen:
The Girl of the Alps Becomes a Moving Image

Among those theories by those who distance themselves from Fidelity Criticism and rather endorse the belief that adapted texts and adaptations engage in a sort of intertextual, intergenerational conversation, one finds the transtextual model as established by Gerard Genette in his The Architext. The author takes inspiration from Bakhtin (dialogism) and Kristeva (intertextuality) to develop his ideas on transtextuality, which he defines as the “textual transcendence of the text, all that sets the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts” (Genette, 1992: 83). Genette talks about five different types of transtextuality, although hypertextuality deserves the most attention, and is also the focus of this analysis. Hypertextuality examines the relations between a text – the hypertext – and its predecessor – the hypotext –, which the hypertext modifies, re-elaborates or amplifies. According to Genette, hypertextuality involves “any relationship uniting a text B (hypertext) to an earlier text A (hypotext), upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary” (Genette, 1997: 5). Thus, hypertextuality represents the relation between a text and a text on which it is based but which it transforms, modifies, elaborates or extends. Spyri’s Heidi has no doubt also been the inspiration of many other literary and filmic products and, as a hypotext, it also includes an archetypical figure – the innocent child-figure who is able to change the lives and attitudes of others and whose goodness is often portrayed in relation to nature. Heidi-like figures include Pollyanna, the protagonist of the homonymous novel by Eleanor H. Porter (1913), Anne Shirley, the main character in Anne of Green Gables (Montgomery, 1907) or Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden (Burnett, 1911).

Most of the cinematic adaptations of Spyri’s novels evidently do not intend to deviate greatly from the hypotext. Such is the case of Luigi Comencini’s Heidi (1952), the first Swiss film adaptation; Delbert Mann’s Heidi (1968), starring Jean Simmons as Fräulein Rottenmeier; or the more recent live-action film versions of the novel released in 1993 and 2015. The former, a three-hour television mini-series with ambitions to become the family entertainment of the year, is a Hollywoodish Walt Disney production, directed by Michael Rhodes, with British actress Jane Seymour playing an unconventionally attractive Fräulein Rottenmeier, and containing all the elements that audiences expect in a feel-good movie for children or family audiences. In contrast, the most recent Swiss version of Heidi (2015) – directed by Alain Gsponer and starring national treasure Bruno Ganz as Heidi’s grandfather and Hannelore Hoger as Frau Sesemann, Clara’s grandmother – does not spare the viewer the sordid elements of the story – poverty and cruelty towards children –, yet shows a joyful, innocent and pure Heidi (Anuk Steffen), just as Spyri might have imagined her in 1880.

However, some film adaptations have transformed or extended the hypotext, in order to retell Heidi’s story in different contexts or for different audiences. For instance, in the famous Hollywood version from 1937, directed by Allan Dwan and starring Shirley Temple in the role of Heidi, the plot is radically altered to become a sort of film noir – a genre that was in vogue at the time – in which good battles evil and in which Fräulein Rottenmeier displays criminal tendencies in a bid not to lose her power inside the Sesemann’s household. The moral element is indeed present but bears no relation to nature; instead it is linked to the presence of innate human features. Likewise, a more recent Heidi (Markus Imboden, 2001) portrays an orphan who is taken to Berlin by her aunt Dete, a successful fashion designer, to become the companion of her very own daughter, Clara, an emotionally deprived teenager, who has no interest in becoming friends with her younger cousin or letting her steal the little attention she receives from her own mother. As in its hypotext, Heidi longs to return to the mountains to be with her grandfather and her friend Peter and manages to do so by the end of the movie. The film leaves out the Sesemann household completely, and Heidi’s good nature is juxtaposed on this occasion with her overindulged and far from empathetic cousin.

As it is an appropriate story for family audiences and for children, in particular, Spyri’s work has also been transformed several times into animated versions. In spite of a tendency to consider animated versions of classical literary works “unholy” (Wells, 2007:199), the fact is that Heidi’s cartoons have become cult viewing for more than one generation of audiences. The most celebrated animated version of Heidi is, without a doubt, the renowned 1974 TV series Arupusu no Shôjo Haiji, Japanese for Heidi, Girl of the Alps, which marked the beginning of the ‘anime-boom’ in Japan (Fornasari, 2018: 365). The series, which was produced by Zuiyo Enterprises and directed by Isao Takahata, faithfully transferred the adventures of the Swiss character onto the screen in 52 episodes. As Fornasari (2018: 367) points out, its popularity helped to establish the unmistakable appearance of the characters – drawn by Oscar-winner Hayao Miyazaki – in the popular imagination: Heidi as a dark-haired, rosy-cheeked girl, Clara as a pale, blonde girl dressed in blue sitting in a wheelchair and Fräulein Rottenmeier as the strictest and most hardhearted woman in the history of television, with her tight bun and her pince-nez. The anime also included one of the most iconic characters, namely the dog Josef, which never appeared in the novel, but was created by the Japanese authors to add some comic and charming episodes to the story.

In 1982, the powerful producers Hanna-Barbera Cartoons developed another animated version of Spyri’s creation. In the form of a musical, Heidi’s Song deviates greatly from its hypotext, both in terms of content and in the values it aims to convey. When Heidi is in Frankfurt, Peter and the country animals come to rescue her. Together with Clara, the three escape back to the mountains. When Clara’s father returns to Frankfurt, however, he is angered to see that his daughter has disappeared and immediately leaves for Switzerland to bring her back. Meanwhile, Rottenmeier and the butler Sebastian, who in this version plays an equally evil character, take the opportunity to flee. Up on the mountain, Clara is attacked by a hawk and, when she crawls out of her wheelchair to use a stick to fight it off, she discovers that she is able to stand. In keeping with the spirit of the novel, the film portrays the fears and longings of its two main characters, namely Heidi and Clara, in their process of growing up: on the one hand, it depicts Clara’s coming of age and her yearning for romantic love; on the other, it shows Heidi’s fears which are condensed in a few scenes and are those of every child (darkness, the unknown, being lost or losing loved ones). This interpretation of Spyri’s works is meant to please the palates of American audiences, as it embraces the most American of film genres, namely the musical, and includes a hint of romance in the story. Indeed, this merging of reality and imagination in the depiction of characters, together with the presence of musical numbers have become typical features of animated movies, particularly those by Walt Disney.

In 2015, Heidi 3D, a Franco-Australian co-production of a total of thirty-nine episodes, marked the fortieth anniversary of the anime Heidi, the Girl of the Alps. Even if this CGI-animation remake also draws inspiration from the original novel, it mainly models itself on the Japanese animation series. The physical resemblance of the main characters in the two series is very obvious, even if the most recent adaptation offers more colorful and detailed versions of their anime predecessors. Despite the series being considerably shorter, as a hypertext, it manages both to expand the plot and to develop the characters by being far more interpretive. It even allows the viewer to empathize with one of the main protagonists, the ever-loathed Rottenmeier and depicts her as a more vulnerable and sympathetic figure. In general, all the characters are re-examined and given individual story arcs: from Peter, who finds out he can be good at school, to the grandfather, whose past is gradually revealed, as well as Clara or her grandmother. The series is thus able to develop and somewhat re-invent the original characters, allowing them to leave behind the two-dimensional figures of the first animated version and to provide new insights into their personalities and backgrounds, which were concealed or only implied in the hypotext.

3 Analysis

As mentioned in the introduction, and according to Cartmell and Whelehan (2007: 34), adaptations of literary works for television, unlike their cinematic counterparts, have often been excluded from the realm of adaptation studies, despite their popularity from the 1970s onwards, and have been – more often than not – subject to pejorative judgments from scholars and critics, one of the most common being that they reflect television’s tendency towards “conservative programming in contrast with the more innovative proposals of cinema” (Cardwell, 2007: 183). Spyri’s Heidi was one of the many works of literature which was turned into an animated television series1 in the 1970s and early 1980s, as part of a surge of adaptations of classical works of literature aimed for the small screen which made their way into most Western households.

The first Heidi animated TV series partly fits into the definition of transposition as established by Wagner “in which a novel is directly given on the screen, with the minimum of apparent interference” and in which the film is frequently “envisaged as a book illustration” (Wagner, 1975: 222). Transpositions re-tell in a different platform or genre the content of the story, but nonetheless preserve characterization of figures and the chronotope of the original text (cf. McCall...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Titel
• Impressum
• Inhaltsverzeichnis
• “I WANT MY MONEY BACK”: Some Considerations on the Dialectics of Texts and Films
• PART 1 CHILDREN’S STORIES FOR ADULTS
• PART 2 THE FANTASTIC: FROM THE PAST AND THE FUTURE
• PART 3 FOR WOMEN WAR IS NEVER OVER
• PART 4 DEMANDING THEIR OWN VOICE, STATING THEIR OWN NEEDS
• PART 5 (MUSIC IS) A WORLD WITHIN ITSELF
• Fußnoten