Each paper focuses on a different film directed by Hitchcock: Strangers on a Train, Rope, and Vertigo. Each paper discusses a different literary genre in connection with the film: drama, novel, and short story. Each paper selects a text from a different historical period: Elizabethan, Regency, and interwar England. Most significantly, each paper approaches its pairing of literary and cinematic texts through a different lens: the social instability of assimilation, the dramaturgical function of objects, and the narratological status of adaptation.
Finally, each presenter comes from a different career stage at a different institution: Mollie Bowman is a PhD candidate at Pennsylvania State University; Sarah Baber, nearing completion of her PhD, will then be a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Notre Dame; and Jonathan Olson is an associate professor of English at Grand Canyon University.
The diversity of perspectives—historical, generic, theoretical, professional, and institutional—offered by this session promises many rich avenues for at least 15 minutes of discussion. We anticipate that the presenters, presider, and attendees alike will be eager to tease out multiple points of connection between the three 15- to 18-minute papers:
Mollie Bowman observes that The Merchant of Venice and Strangers on a Train end on shockingly similar notes. Both Jessica and Guy Haines integrate themselves into their dominant societies by severing their bonds with figures of difference, Shylock and Bruno Antony. However, both unsettle their assimilation in their final moments: Jessica, discontent with the “sweet music” (5.1.77) of Christian society, is silent during the final act; and Guy quietly retreats after seeing a man who reminds him of Bruno, both implying that their social standings are still under threat. While Jessica’s unstable position is tied to religious difference in Merchant, Guy’s is less clear. Based on these unsettled endings, Bowman positions Strangers as a non-adaptation of Merchant and asserts that the structure of religious difference in Merchant makes clear the subtextual structure of sexual difference in Strangers that is tied to Bruno and threatens Guy’s re-integration. Placing these works in tandem allows for the examination of the limits of (re)assimilation and makes clear the threatening nature of each dominant society.
Situated in a Regency drawing room and a mid-twentieth-century Manhattan apartment, the pianos in Jane Austen’s Emma and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope serve as instruments of intrigue and suspense in Sarah Baber’s analysis. In Emma, the mysterious arrival of a Broadwood pianoforte activates Highbury’s network of gossip. As the narrator offers clues about the sender of Jane Fairfax’s gift, readers are drawn into an Austenian “whodunnit”: what does the piano and its accompanying parcel of music reveal about the novel’s hidden romantic subplot? In Hitchcock’s psychological crime thriller, the source of suspense is reversed. Within the first two minutes, the audience has already seen the crime and the perpetrators; the question is whether the murderers will escape detection. Here, the piano shifts from facilitating sociability to prompting interrogation and self-betrayal. This paper examines the musical specifics of each work—the Irish song “Robin Adair” and Francis Poulenc’s Mouvements perpétuels—proposing that Austen and Hitchcock use the piano to generate both musical and narrative clarity.
A neglected literary source for Vertigo raises questions about types of allusion, quotation, and adaptation in Jonathan Olson’s paper. The film’s scenes at Mission Dolores, below Golden Gate Bridge, and in Scottie’s apartment bear striking similarities to the second half of D.H. Lawrence’s short story, The Horse-Dealer’s Daughter, yet no discussion of their relationship seems to have been published in the twenty years since Daniel Humphrey first observed the connection in passing. While the naming of James Stewart’s character is a conventional allusion to Lawrence’s story, the narrative scenario in Hitchcock’s film occupies a different relationship to its source than that of a typical adaptation. The film’s scenes that derive from Lawrence’s story function as a ‘diegetic adaptation’ in which the characters Gavin Elster and Judy Barton have incorporated Lawrence’s story into the fiction of the confidence scheme they have written to suit their mark. Appreciating Yannis Tzioumakis’s distinction between ‘con artist’ and ‘con game’ films, and developing the presenter’s own work on allegorical metafiction, this paper identifies a new aspect of Vertigo’s frequently noted commentary on filmmaking.