Inky Shadows

Introduction: Inky Shadows

Movie Actors Scribbling Letters Very Fast in Crucial Scenes

The velocity with which they write –
Don’t you know it? It’s from the heart!
They are acting the whole part out.
Love! Has taken them up –
Like writing to god in the night.
Meet me! I’m dying! Come at once!
The crisis is on them, the shock
Drives from the nerve to the pen,
Pours from the blood into ink.

- By Jean Garrigue

Whenever we describe another person or recount a story involving people other than ourselves we commit a biographical act. Whether berating or celebrating the subject we portray, our interpretation of
the individual is presented from a specific point of view, developed on the basis of a certain amount of knowledge and structured in a particular way. The detail which we pour into our narrative will invariably have been selected and as such is incomplete. Elements of the story, whether consciously or otherwise, will have been omitted and other aspects will be accentuated, producing one interpretation of the character we portray from a myriad of possible versions. A biopic is an impression of a life as opposed to an absolute replica or some kind of perfectly cloned transcription of the existence which it explores. Friedrich Nietzsche asserts that truth is “enhanced, transposed and embellished poetically and rhetorically,” during the storytelling process. Any retelling of a lived experience therefore, will be a distorted narrative and in the same way that qualities within a story will be lost and gained when a text is translated from one language into another, elements of a life will be altered when an individual’s story is translated from the lived reality into a biographical account.

Biographical films - or ‘biopics’ - are the descendants of an extensive catalogue of biographical expressions stretching throughout history. From notations on cave walls and Egyptian pyramids remembering both the lives of kings and slaves, to statues and monuments eulogising those who have started wars and those who have perished in them and written biographies recording the lives of statesmen, sporting figures, singers, princes, performers and poets, indeed figures from every sphere of life, biographical acts have occurred in every society through many different systems of communication. Biographies, in any form, can be seen to represent an instinct to preserve life, as George Custen puts forward, “one of the oldest human impulses is to record for posterity something of the lives of one’s fellows.” Taking a photograph of a friend creates a biographical portrait of a moment in their life, shot from a certain angle and saturated with symbols which build to construct an impression of the chosen subject.

Photographs however, rarely reach audiences as wide as those which will go to see biopic films. The sociological impact of biographical cinema is explored in Custen’s comprehensive study, ‘Bio/Pics – How Hollywood Constructed Public History,’ which presents how the Hollywood studio era (1927-1960) contrived a hegemonic view of history, assembling a monochromatic understanding of what a significant, ideal or great life was composed of. Scrutinising more than one hundred biopics produced during the studio era in terms of the gender, race, sexuality and professions of the subject’s depicted, Custen argues that, “While most biopics do not claim to be the definitive history of an individual or era, they are often the only source of information many people will ever have on a given historical subject.” He goes on to illustrate how biopics transmit evaluations of history which denote only one version of events or present a singular impression of an individual from the many possible versions available, imaginable or accurately representative of the subject’s identity.

After Custen’s comprehensive study on the biopics of the studio era and his later essay, ‘The Mechanical Life in the Age of Human Reproduction’ which looks at biopics produced between 1961 and 1980, little else has been written specifically on biographical film, in fact many encyclopaedias of film studies have neglected to even include a section on the biopic. As such it has been both necessary and valuable to look at the theory and debates on biography in its literary form, a genre written about extensively. Neil Sinyard and Belén Vidal have however, both produced short pieces on biopics depicting the lives of specifically literary figures, Vidal’s work centring on female artists in particular, and their writing has been indispensable to my research which has concentrated on cinema’s portrayal of the lives of female writers. The content of discourses on literary biography can be applied to biopics as essentially, all biographical texts involve the same procedures in refiguring a life, as Hayden White suggests, “Every written history is a product of processes of condensation, displacement, symbolisation and qualification” continuing “it is only the medium that differs, not the way in which the messages are produced.” Furthermore, the use of criticism and theories aligned with both film studies and literature seems appropriate considering the amalgamation of these fields that occurs in the hybrid form of the literary biopic, the cinematic portrait of a writer. The work of gynocritcs such as Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar has also been fundamental to my research. Gynocriticism endeavours to adopt frameworks constructed specifically for the analysis of literature produced by women, adapting and escaping masculine models of criticism and aspiring to document a female literary history. Gynocritics argue that women who write should be free of the phallocentric systems which attempt to contain, suppress and silence them. The work of feminist voices who have advocated the emancipation of women’s writing from the patriarchal ideologies entrenched within literature has been imperative to my research, given that my exploration of biopics had concentrated on those depicting female writers. The novels and poetry produced by the figures featured in films included in my study have of course also been crucial in the attempt to understand how the particular writers might be portrayed most authentically in a biographical depiction, as writing can be seen to reveal facets of an artist’s inner and outer lives.

One of the difficulties implicit in commenting on biography, is the fact that when passing judgement on one biographer’s position we reveal our own prejudices and beliefs which go to form another biographical opinion that we ourselves feel to be the most authentic version of a life. For instance, my reading of Sylvia (2003) will be influenced by an engagement with certain discourses that have projected Ted Hughes as an oppressive editor of Plath’s poetry and as such I personally find the film’s constant competitive comparison between the literary accomplishments of the two poets problematic. In the criticism of biography, our own partiality means that we will either disagree or concur with the position of a biographer to privilege one version of the subject in question. My concern with the biopic’s trope of a ‘contest’ between the two poets goes to formulate yet another biographical interpretation of Plath this time suggesting that her life and work should not be viewed in opposition with her husband’s. A biographer must decide which particular form of ‘truth’ they wish to substantiate – for example, the weather on the morning of a writer’s suicide may in reality have been sunny, bright and beautiful but the biographer may portray it as raining, grey and miserable to symbolise the event. Should a biographer validate facts before feelings? Should they demonstrate only proven, verified details supported by strong evidence or try and convey interior aspects of a person which may well be impossible to qualify? It must be remembered that definitive, absolute biographies do not exist.

Frieda Plath, the daughter of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes objected fervently to the cinematic depiction of her mother’s life and death, stating, “My mother’s poems cannot be crammed into the mouths of actors in any filmic reinvention of her story in the expectation that they can breathe life into her again.” Through the close analysis of various ‘literary biopics,’ a term which for my purposes here refers to life-pictures portraying the existence of authors and poets, this study will examine how the lives of female writers have been treated in filmic interpretations. Looking primarily at literary biopics produced since the beginning of the new millennium, such as Sylvia a study of the life of Sylvia Plath, The Hours (2003) and Iris (2002) which depict the lives of Virginia Woolf and Iris Murdoch respectively, this study analyses how the problematic retelling of real lives has been approached by filmmakers. Identifying the various strategies used in biopics to structure the narrative of a life story, the first chapter, ‘Arranging Their Skeletons’ concentrates on how the lives of female writers have been reconstructed and observes which elements of the women’s lives (or deaths) are depicted. Reflecting my own opinion that the most interesting aspect of a writer’s life is in fact the writing which is produced, the next chapter, ‘Seeing Read,’ discusses the portrayal of the literary act in the biopic and sees how female writers are projected on screen.

André Maurois likens the biographical act, the quest for capturing the ‘truth’ of an individual in a portrayal of that person’s life, to chasing a shadow. Describing the difficulties, the futility even, of such a pursuit he continues, “Every time we thought to lay a hand upon the ghostly shoulder of the phantom, it split into two others which fled by different paths in opposite directions.” Interpreting Maurois’ metaphor to symbolise the complex search for the biographical representation of an individual which most epitomises that person’s ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ self, this essay will examine how literary biopics have attempted to hunt and depict the ‘shadow-phantoms’ of female writers. What strategies do the films adopt in order to trap the elusive, shifting and manifold shadow-phantoms which go to comprise one self?

1
Arranging Their Skeletons

“Each man gave his version. Each version differed slightly from the others. This was understandable.” – Joan Didion.

Arranging the life of an individual in a biographical depiction of their existence is similar to designing an enclosure for a particular animal in a zoo. No two species are identical and so individually developed habitats are demanded and yet certain biographers continue to use generic structures to display the behaviours of whoever it is they hold captive. A biopic is an artificial environment which attempts to emulate the true landscape of a life. This chapter will examine how filmmakers have reconstructed the lives of female writers.

Neil Sinyard, in his discussion of the portrayal of literary lives in cinema points out that, “Traditionally, biography has taken the form of a linear realist narrative, the subject’s life told in chronological order from the cradle to the grave.” A focus on chronology can be seen to imply that the talents and achievements of the biopic’s subject are the building result of experiences accumulated throughout their life, products which, if the film begins with the individual’s birth and an exploration of their formative years, may be portrayed as being heavily influenced by the subject’s socialisation as a child. Such discourses can be seen to involve problematic hegemonies which perpetuate certain dominant social ideologies, for instance the idea that children who will go on to become champions of a particular field, be it in a sporting, political or artistic sphere, are from heteronormative families from the upper and middle classes, in which both parents are present and active. Another trajectory of the birth scene, as Custen points out, is the insinuation that “the gift which would bring the hero fame was present in some embryonic form at life’s debut.” Thus biopics can be recognised as engaging with debates of whether ‘genius’ is primarily a consequence of nurture or an innate, inborn gift of nature. Though birth scenes were frequent in the biopics assessed in Custen’s survey, he found that only 29 percent of his sample films included the death of the subject, commenting, “Death in the biopic, though rare, is typically uplifting.”

The literary biopics I have focussed on demonstrate a dramatic shift away from the traditional use of chronological structures and the convention of the inclusion of the birth and elision of the death scene apparent in the majority of biopics produced in Hollywood’s studio era. Both The Hours and Sylvia open with the deaths of their respective subjects and Iris concentrates on the Alzheimer’s leading to Murdoch’s death, the moment of which is also depicted towards the end of the film. None of the biopics involve a birth scene and although the childhoods of the writers are occasionally alluded to, no vignettes from these periods are dramatised. The turn taken by many biopic filmmakers towards more inventive structures in which to frame the lives of their subjects, could be read as urging that life is intricately complex and so shapes differing from the ever forwardly moving thrust of chronology may function more effectively to structure the story of a life.

The structure of Iris is hinged upon Murdoch’s forty year relationship with the professor John Bayley and oscillates between scenes depicting the beginnings of their love in young adulthood and scenes dealing with the onset of Murdoch’s disease, faced by the pair as an elderly couple. Iris is structured like the form of the letter ‘x’ or a cross, as the development of the love story is juxtaposed with the decline of Murdoch’s mind as it is dissolved by Alzheimer’s, described by Murdoch as like “sailing into the darkness.” These two contrasting motions in the film’s structure operate together to highlight the tragedy of what is lost as the disease intensifies. As the Alzheimer’s escalates so too does the love story being explored in the scenes from the couple’s youth, during which Murdoch’s success as a novelist is also shown to heighten. The central pivot of the cross formulation, occurs in scenes during which the youthful and elderly characters are confronted with one another and the two worlds of past and present diverge.

Director Richard Eyre uses contrasting scenes to illustrate the huge gulf of difference between Murdoch at the pinnacle of her productivity and artistry and the same self battling to formulate simple sentences or to identify a picture of a spoon in medical examinations set to assess the degree to which the disease has progressed.
One example of this alternation between the lucid, highly intelligent younger Murdoch and her older, mentally deteriorating self, occurs in a sequence during which Kate Winslet, in her portrayal of the younger Murdoch, is pictured riding a bicycle and discussing her first novel excitedly. This action is positioned next to a scene involving the writer’s older self as played by Judi Dench, straining to complete what would become her final novel, clasping her head in a gesture of distress and repeatedly crossing out words. As the biopic flickers between studies of the author at the beginning and end of her career, Eyre exposes colliding narratives of hope and despair and so synthesises that life is an amalgamation of both beauty and tragedy, a philosophy evident in much of Murdoch’s own prose. The film’s structure also acts to reveal turbulences in the relationship between Murdoch and Bayley. For instance, a scene depicting the moment the young couple make love for the first time is situated next to one detailing a crippling argument between the older couple, provoked by the stress caused in dealing with Murdoch’s disease. The swinging patterns which
are produced by the use of alternation, the continual switching from the younger to older Murdochs, infers that life is tremulous, undetermined and indefinite, unlike the arguably more certain and assured thrust of linear chronology. The mirroring, darting reflections cast between the events within the love story and the parallel narrative documenting the Alzheimer’s, draws an affiliation between intense love and disease, inferring the emotion is spreading and unstoppable. This analogy is reliant on the use of the thematically arranged as opposed to chronologically composed structure.

The past and present are shown to intersect during scenes in which the couple swim together in a river, naked when their younger selves and clothed when the older identities are represented. Point of view shots belonging to Dench’s Murdoch are used to establish the otherworldly waterscapes experienced when swimming under the surface. Occasionally, fleeting and ghostly glimpses of the younger Murdoch appear in the frame so the aged, slowing dying writer is confronted by themselves as a young, defiant woman, a strange meeting in which the past is shown to emanate like a flickering shadow. Here, Eyre makes a similar statement to André Maurois’ assertion that the act of biography is like hunting for shadow-phantoms belonging to the subject. By setting these abrupt, uncanny meetings between the older and younger Murdochs in the murky, dark and imprecise depths of running water where nothing can be clearly seen – Eyre implies that memory is vague and insecure. This declaration of uncertainty applies not only to medical conditions effecting the mind such as the Alzheimer’s around which the plot nestles, but to the act of remembering itself and, therefore, to all autobiographical and biographical operations.

Eyre suggests that every memory is a particular version of events which will alter depending on how deep, dark or fast running the water of the present, from which we reach out to the past, happens to be. When we remember past selves or past events, we remember a shadow whose form we can never quite trust to be entirely authentic. It seems then, that the structure of Iris is designed to privilege the movements of the memory rather than replicate facts of chronology. This unstable and disorderly form wills the audience not to passively accept that the story told adheres to reality with an unflinching fidelity, but promotes the idea that memory is chaotic, and so any retelling of a life in biography will deviate from the exact way in which the life was lived. The importance placed on the impossibility of rendering a life completely accurately seems to reflect Murdoch’s own voice in ‘The Sea, The Sea,’ when she writes, “One can be too ingenious in trying to search out the truth. Sometimes one must simply respect its veiled face.” Iris can be seen to allow such ‘veils’ to remain in tact as it adopts a position in which the ‘truths’ told are presented as tentative and partial and unlike other more aggressively voyeuristic biographies, does not attempt to raid and rob the life explored of its secrets.

Another device used to collide the realms of past youth and present old age in Iris, is the instance of characters opening doors or windows in their world and being subjected to a scene from their past through the use of flashback. This again, supports the idea that the film is structured to emulate the workings of the memory rather than to replicate reality. The anachronic patterning of Iris and its coupling of scenes from past and present worlds infers that sensations experienced by an individual - a taste, smell or sound recalled as having been experienced before, can act transportively - carrying the mind to another time in which the same or a similar feeling was encountered. This tendency for the memory to be triggered towards another tangent of thought by an object, place or sense is a devise employed by many biographers to enable the narratives which they construct to traverse significant expanses of time and thus create parallels between separate stages in their subject’s life. Joan Didion, in an autobiography recounting the deaths of her husband and daughter, refers to such instances of the mind’s ability to navigate wildly through the past as ‘The Vortex Effect’. She goes on to explain her discovery that the only way to escape the often painful confrontations with the history of one’s own memory is to, “avoid noticing anything that might lead back into the past. Going back has trick currents, unrevealed eddies, you can be skimming along on what looks like clear water and suddenly go under. Get sucked down.” Didion’s comparison of the memory with deceptive, sneaking undercurrents illuminates Eyre’s own use of the river as a site where past and present collide, a place where a calm, beautiful surface may conceal dangerous tides. Eyre’s river acts as a metaphorical mirror between the two worlds reflecting backwards and forwards what it was that was had, primarily communication, words, understanding and love, and what it is that is lost as Murdoch’s command of language liquefies. Such binaries as ‘safety and danger,’ ‘clarity and disorientation’ and ‘independence and need’ are dramatised against one another throughout Iris and dependant on the film’s parallel structure. The biopic’s form insists that the disease explored in the ‘present’ narrative strand is so tragic because there is so much to be lost, the content of which is projected in the other thread composed of flashbacks into youth. The juxtaposition of the young and old characters is initially misleading in the sense that, because of the contrasting ages portrayed, the audience may anticipate a narrative similar to that of William Blake’s series of poem’s - in which those centring on youth are entitled ‘Innocence’ and those dealing with more mature, adult themes grouped under the heading ‘Experience.’ Iris draws on the assumption that the characters will be vulnerable and naïve when their youthful selves and wise and capable when older, then shows how the effects of the Alzheimer’s reverse this narrative rendering the once highly astute and intellectual Murdoch as helpless and wholly dependent on others in old age.

Like Iris, Christine Jeff’s Sylvia is also structured on the basis of a love story, a characteristic typical of biopics depicting female subjects, as Belén Vidal asserts, “The contemporary biopic shows a renewed engagement with the formative narratives of feminism – the struggle for women’s self expression, the identification between women artists now and then – by filtering them through the politics of romance.” Scaffolded around the relationship between the poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, the film ranges from the pair’s first encounter at a party then through their early passion, marriage, bringing up their children and finally to the collapse of the marriage after Hughes’ affair with Assia Wevill. Sylvia takes the form of a microbiography charting one significant period from its protagonist’s history as opposed to the life in its entirety. Following the poet from the early stages of her career to her death via a sequence of chronological events, the structure of which is deviated from only once, it is more closely related to the biopics indicative of the studio era as defined by Custen, than other contemporary examples of the literary biopic.

The use of the overriding chronological structure is disrupted only by the biopic’s opening sequence, which involves an extreme close up on the image of the dead Plath’s face coupled with a voiceover. As such, the structure is ‘interrupted’ before it technically begins, meaning that once the dominant biographical form of chronology is initiated any alternative structural expressions are prevented from infiltrating its authoritarian march. The biopic opens with a depiction of its subject’s death, which as we’ve established, would be an extremely atypical feature of its antecedent’s produced in Hollywood’s studio era. However, the picture quickly reverts to the convention of chronology in order to encase the depiction of Plath’s life between scenes engrossing on her death. Claire Brennan puts forward that “Plath’s early death seems to lock her writing into a self-perpetuating, enclosed crisis of interpretation. The early critical obsession with Plath’s life seems to limit the readings, however incisive and insightful they may be, to problematic biographical interpretations.” The decision to begin the film with an image of the writer’s corpse situates the biopic firmly within the ‘crisis’ Brennan warns of, as the audience is encouraged to view all the events portrayed through the lens of Plath’s suicide, seeing her life in terms of her death. The sequence can be seen to borrow from the language of the horror genre. After the camera’s lengthy, static focus on the writer’s pale, deceased face the corpse, which is lit with a disturbing blue wash, abruptly opens its eyes as if to frighten the audience. The inclusion of this is troubling as the sudden ‘reawakening’ of Plath just before the film commences into its chronological narrative, infers that the story is told from her own perspective after death, the focus on the eyes signalling that this version of events is somehow recounted from her own point of view. In view of this, the biopic could be accused of adding to the reams of criticism and biographies on Plath which perpetuate the myth of a figure who, to use Irving Feldman’s description, is projected as “glamorous with misery,” discourses which often invest more ‘importance’ on Plath’s suicide than on her work. Indeed, the biopic documents the process of Plath’s suicide intricately and methodically, the camera following the figure voyeuristically as she is portrayed ritualistically and calmly preparing for her own death. Although pathologist reports and police investigations provide information regarding the specific events of her suicide, the interpretation of Plath’s disposition as serene and tranquil in the moments proceeding her death can only of course be imagined details as no other adults were present at the time to testify precisely how she behaved. Substitutions, transpositions and the projection of imagined possibilities are engrained within all biographies and as Daniel Defoe states in his preface to ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ do no in themselves act to attack or reject the truth in the sense that, “It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not.” However the insinuation that the story told in this biopic is Plath’s own version of events as opposed to her biographer’s could be construed as damaging, as the claim over the poet’s subjectivity is fraudulent and misleading. Conversely, the biopic’s inclusion of this ‘reawakening’ could be taken simply as an allusion to Plath’s poem ‘Lady Lazarus,’ a rewriting of a biblical story in which a woman repeatedly returns from the dead. This alternative interpretation of the biopic’s opening would suggest that the poet survives, like the character from her poem, in the engagement with and discussion of her work, thus promoting a more positive mythology for Plath than narratives which concentrate on her suicide.

It should be noted here that restrictions placed on the film’s production by Plath’s literary estate prevented the use of much direct quotation from the poet’s work, thus the biopic adopts various strategies to convey the writer’s voice without the free reign of her written words – a topic which will be explored further in the following chapter, ‘Seeing Read.’ Gwyneth Paltrow, who plays the biopic’s version of Plath, narrates the opening voiceover which references a passage from Plath’s own work. The opening voiceover describes a dream in which Paltrow’s Plath imagines her life as taking the shape of a tree with different branches symbolising the different routes and options available to her in life. One branch signifies motherhood, one an academic career and another represents her poetry. The voiceover therefore, can be recognised as an allusion to a passage in ‘The Bell Jar’ which reads, “From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor”. The content of the voiceover creates the expectation that the biopic may also go on to resemble the structure of the tree discussed - perhaps exploring various aspects of the poet’s life, detailing their spreading apart and then clattering back against each other as if branches. However the biopic really only interrogates Plath and Hughes’ relationship, leaving other aspects of Plath’s life as barely looked at leaves, clinging on to this main narrative branch.

Although backboned, after the initial image of the dead Plath, by a strictly chronological structure, Sylvia uses a similar pattern of alternation between scenes of happiness and those of suffering, to the juxtapositions of lightness and dark which occur in Iris. The scene following the image of Plath’s corpse for example, depicts the poet recklessly riding a bright red bicycle and exuding a vibrant, infectious energy. The contrast of periods of miserable inertia with heightened, animated liveliness could be seen to refer to Plath’s history of mental illness, during which she experienced extreme, crashing depressions followed by manic highs. The juxtaposition of such scenes can therefore be read as an attempt to capture this aspect of Plath’s personality in the biopic’s structural skeleton. Another scene of elation occurs when Plath and Hughes’ first meet one another at a party for the launch of a new poetry publication. Again, this scene has striking similarities with the portrayal of the young Murdoch and Bayley at a party sequence in Iris. Both biopics foreground their female protagonists in these scenes, setting them apart from the many other women at the parties by projecting them as more articulate, interesting and attractive – Winslet’s Murdoch, in a whirl of excitement and hedonism gracefully falls down a set of stairs after infatuating a whole table of dinner guests with her wit and Paltrow’s Plath is costumed in a startling red dress contrasting the muted, drab colours worn by the extras populating the scene. Both biopics cast the writers as strange and exotic beings at parties flooded with ‘normal’ people. This projection of the writer as a mysterious ‘other’ relates to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s suggestion that female writers, because of the history of patriarchal dominance throughout literature, feel isolated and excluded when participating in the creative act of writing, the idea of which will be expanded on in the next chapter. In terms of their use as structural devices, the party scenes function to quickly establish the historical and social settings of the stories to which they belong through the music that is played and dances performed, the costumes worn and the aesthetics of the set. Such conventions illustrate why the biopic and costume or historical dramas, are often seen as hybrid genres. Plath and Hughes both had work published in the edition of ‘Saint Bartolph’s Review’ which the party celebrated. The criticism that each of the pair received in this publication, the reception to Plath’s piece being scathingly negative and the response to Hughes’ piece glowingly positive, sets up a key trope recurring throughout the film, in which the two writers are repeatedly compared directly against one another; evaluated competitively in terms of their poetry, behaviour, academic careers, parenting skills and faithfulness. The concept of competition provides the biopic’s structure with accelerations to propel the momentum of the narrative’s through-line, instilling in more static scenes, such as those occurring in the classroom or with Plath bent over her typewriter, a sense of kineticism brought about by the suggestion of a race between the pair.

Stephen Daldry, director of The Hours explains, “We never wanted to impersonate or imitate Virginia Woolf, but find our own Virginia Woolf,” in a statement supporting the idea that a biographical portrait is just one particular version of a life.
The biopic approaches its hunt for Woolf with a structure formed of three distinct narratives that in places converge. Each story is representative of an element of Woolf – one depicting her physical self in a portrayal by Nicole Kidman, another dramatising her novel ‘Mrs Dalloway,’ the story of which is transposed on to a 1980s New York setting and the third telling the story of a young mother battling suicidal impulses, who is reading ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and who recognises herself in the plot’s themes of isolation and the desperation to please others in order to feel a sense of self worth. The film’s skeleton performs a waltz between these plots which symbolise the roles of the Writer, Story and Reader - exploring its subject not solely through the writer’s own interactions with others but also observing the characters she created and audiences she addressed. By encompassing different aspects of Woolf’s existence, The Hours acknowledges both her outer, public life in the narrative focussing on her relationship with Leonard Woolf as well as the inner life in which she produced her novels. In dramatising products of Woolf’s imagination, Daldry ignites themes of survival and continuation, showing how Woolf’s ideas and characters
transcend her death. Thus although the opening of The Hours is similar to Sylvia in that it begins with the subject’s suicide, Woolf’s death does not manifest itself to be the film’s primary focus and instead the picture looks at the writer’s treatment and execution of characters and her impact on her readers as aspects working symbiotically to build the individual’s multidimensional, intricately constructed self.
This move away from concentrating on the biographical subject’s death is appropriate in a picture about Woolf as she herself, in her writing on biography, satirised “the extent to which the historian’s of life, dwell on the death bed scene,” as Laura Marcus notes. It seems then, that the use of various narratives operating simultaneously to explore different aspects of one self may function more effectively in the attempt to capture the elusive, intangible shadows that populate biographies. The biopic’s adoption of multiple characters used to convey an overall impression of one self alludes to Woolf’s own experiment with biography in the novel ‘Orlando,’ a mock biographical portrait of Vita Sackville-West. ‘Orlando’ documents the life, or ‘lives’ of a character who experiences the world in both male and female bodies and whose identities manifest themselves at impossibly different points throughout three centuries, inferring that the truth of an individual is made up not only of their interactions with those they meet directly and the society in which they exist, but also in their relationships with both the past and future. The Hours illustrates Woolf’s communications with different periods by situating the plot based on ‘Mrs Dalloway’ in a more contemporary setting so as to show how her ideas and characters survive in and illuminate contexts separate to those in which they originated.

After the opening title sequence featuring Woolf’s suicide by drowning, the biopic transfers between the three stories rapidly, using leitmotifs such as flowers and eggs as tropes recurrent in each narrative. This devise acts to bring cohesion between the different plots and draws parallels between certain characters. The Writer/Story/Reader configuration is introduced by the iconic opening line of the novel on which the film is based. As Kidman’s Woolf writes the words “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself,” Meryl Streep who plays the character of ‘Clarissa,’ a contemporary representation of Clarissa Dalloway enacts the line, carefully choosing flowers for her party from a florist and the character Laura Brown who is played by Julianne Moore, reads the line allowed from her delicately handled, treasured copy of the text. The triangular, multifaceted formulation of the biopic attempts to observe the subject from a range of perspectives, avoiding therefore the dangers which come with portraying a life from just one point of view. As such, as much importance is placed on the stories Woolf created and audiences she affected, as that sited on her relationship with her husband and the explorations of her mental illness.

The structures of the Story and Reader narratives in The Hours emulate the form of ‘Mrs Dalloway’ itself by following the characters through the movements of one day in their lives. The biopic, therefore, can be seen to have a strong fidelity to the particular text from which it derives in the sense that it recreates the novel’s form. The novel’s plot however, as already noted, is transposed from the year 1923 and the setting of Woolf’s London to a 1980s New York in which Clarissa Dalloway lives in a lesbian relationship and the character Septimus Warren Smith, as opposed to suffering as a shell shock victim becomes an author named Richard who is dying of Aid’s. This relationship between The Hours and ‘Mrs Dalloway’ can be seen to act as an analogy for the process of biography itself as it illustrates how some details of a life will be replicated faithfully in an artistic depiction, whereas other facets of the life will invariably be deviated from. J. Hillis Miller identifies in Woolf’s writing a “pulverisation of experience into a multitude of fragmentary particles, each without apparent connection to the other and her dissolution of the usual boundaries between mind and world”. Thus again, the biopic of Woolf’s life can be seen to imitate the writer’s own use of form in that it organises fragments of seemingly disparate and incongruent plots, characters and settings to create an impression of life which reaches beyond surface appearances and external actions.

It has been put forward that what film and biography share in common is the promise of voyeurism for the text’s audience or reader. Pam Cook describes this common feature between the two mediums as “the pleasure of looking at, and perhaps identifying with, the pain and suffering of an exceptional or particularly successful individual.” A scopophilia which is heightened with the amalgamation of the two art forms as occurs in biopic cinema, where the biographical act of looking at a life is played out in front of the audience’s gaze.

Susan Hayward, drawing on Laura Mulvey’s essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’ describes how the female body is repeatedly fragmented and fetishised on screen, with the camera focussing, often in extreme close-up, on specific parts of the female form such as the breasts, legs or hair which, because of the camera’s fixation on them, become saturated with meaning. In her psychoanalytic explanation of voyeurism in film, Hayward goes on, “Voyeurism and fetishism are two strategies adopted by the male to counter his fear of sexual difference (between himself and the female, sexual other) and the fear of castration which he feels as a result of that difference (the woman lacks a penis, the male assumes ‘she’ has been castrated). Thus, adopting the first strategy he fixes the woman with his gaze, voyeuristically investigates her body, and therefore sexuality – she is the object of his investigation and in that way he safely contains her.” I would argue that it is a tendency of the contemporary literary biopic to fragment the lives of the writers they explore in a way akin to the camera’s dissection of the female body into separate, fetishised components. Thus, just as an objectifying camera may focus on breasts and then lips, the biopic segments the woman writer’s life into clearly defined categories. These may include her death (particularly if by suicide,) her sexual relationships (particularly if homosexual, abusive or flecked with infidelity – both Iris and The Hours allude to lesbian relationships or feelings belonging to the writers and Sylvia recounts physical fights and depicts Hughes’ affair graphically) and any illnesses she may have suffered (particularly if mental or especially unusual or grotesque.) The structural arrangements of the biopics concentrating on the lives of Plath and to a lesser extent Murdoch and to a far lesser extent Woolf, function to forward the more ‘sensational’ fragments of their subject’s lives, placing importance on narratives involving death, personal relationships and illness as opposed to the writing the women produced. To continue this parallel between the fragmented female body on screen, and the fragmentation of the life of the female writer – such structures can be seen to ‘safely contain’ the ‘investigated’ individual. If the fragmentation of the fetishised body represents the demystification of the threatening, castrating female, the fragmentation of the life of the female writer could in turn be seen as perpetuating the archetype that women who write are amongst the most dangerous of their sex. As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar point out, traditionally in Western culture “the text’s author is a father, a progenitor, a procreator, an aesthetic patriarch whose pen is an instrument of generative power like his penis.” Women who have challenged, confronted or attempted to claim such powers in both literary and filmic history have continually been punished or pressurised into submission, and it seems that biopic structures which concentrate on suicide before life propagate this as death is foregrounded as the principal aspect of the writer’s existence.

Imposing a structure on the biographical subject’s life is an act similar to a sculptor deciding which stance to depict the individual he memorialises in. Will the subject stand tall and defiantly or look to the ground? Will the biopic commence with the subject’s suicide or a scene in which their talents are first recognised? The shape that is selected will determine how the subject is read by an audience who may privilege this particular impression of the life explored over other available examples or even accept the portrayal as a definitive truth instead of just one version or opinion. As Custen warns, “While most biopics do not claim to be the definitive history of an individual or era, they are often the only source of information many people will have on a given subject.” Therefore, members of an audience watching Sylvia without a prior knowledge of Plath’s writing, will encounter the instance of her suicide before gaining any insight into her poetry, making it more difficult to go on to view her writing as at all distinguishable from the details of her death. In contrast, somebody watching The Hours from the same position is urged to consider Woolf’s life, writing and readers as interconnected components operating together to form one self. The biographer must decide which shape will best contain the particular biographical shadow they wish to capture. The multidimensional portrayal of Woolf in The Hours and the film’s close structural relationship to Woolf’s own work suggests that it may be pertinent to listen to whom the shadow belongs when deciding how best to contain it.

2
Seeing Read

“I must not let her find me writing” – Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

How is the interiority of writing externalised for a biopic audience? Documenting the process of writing in film can be seen as a frustrating dichotomy. A writer’s imagination - navigating thrilling, surreal territories or creating strange, mesmerising characters - may manifest in the actions of the author only as stillness, sitting, sighing and silence… followed by yet more stillness. Furthermore, the brilliant landscapes visited by the subject’s mind may, in fact, be conjured from the less stimulating surroundings of a small room with a desk, a chair, a few books and an old typewriter. Wislawa Szymborska describes the problems encountered when dramatising the literary act as follows, “Poets are the worst. Their work is hopelessly unphotogenic. Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines only to cross out one of them fifteen minutes later… and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens.” This chapter will look at the ways in which the biopics in my study have approached the difficulties in conveying the process of writing and observe how a female author, as an individual usually read or in effect ‘heard and not seen’, is presented.

Drawing heavily on Custen’s work, Mary Murphy outlines the trends in the ‘type’ of biopic subject to be most frequently portrayed in particular eras, grouping the figures depicted in terms of their profession. She discovered that “between the World Wars – royalty and political leaders were figures of choice for filmmakers” and goes on to explain how the next wave of biopics produced roughly between 1941-1960, dealt predominantly with the lives of performing artists. Murphy then puts forward that a current resurgence of the biopic is occurring and that this generation of films is chiefly populated by figures from the visual and literary arts, a development she attributes to “our introspective age”. This idealistic and romanticised notion of a contemplative, meditative epoch if, as Murphy appears to suggest, based principally on the instance of an increase in biopics centring on painters and poets, seems to correlate somewhat less positively with a contemporaneous rise in biopics and ‘based on a true story’ pictures illustrating the lives of notorious serial killers.

Unlike the war scenes which might dominate biopics focussing on political leaders or animated dance scenes which saturate films detailing the lives of famous performance artists, writing is on the whole, a rather immobile occupation, as Neil Sinyard points out, “Writing a book is not a very visual activity. It is static, private and it takes a long time.” One strategy used to evade the repetition of scenes involving the author hunched over a typewriter, screwing up sheets of paper or agitatedly chewing a pencil, is for the filmmaker to dissolve the boundaries between the author’s actual and imagined worlds. In such instances the audience, instead of seeing only the black and white words that the author writes, is immersed in the technicolour, multidimensional worlds that the sum of such words creates. They are permitted access into the writer’s Word Worlds. The dramatisation of these imagined spaces can provide interesting insight into the biopic subject’s psychology, traversing the dimensions of a life which reach beyond parameters such as physical appearance, daily routine and personal relationships and yet can also illuminate such issues.

This is not to suggest that all literary biopics purposefully avoid the motionless silence of the writing act. The opening sequence of Becoming Jane (2007) for instance, displays a succession of images interspersed with short sequences in which the camera focuses in close up on the Jane Austen character’s hand as her words accumulate on the paper in a decorative calligraphy, the imposing style of which works to venerate the creative act. The images, including a slow clock and a dripping tap are metaphors which signify the isolation and stasis which can pervade the life of a writer.
Neither do all literary biopics actually concur with the stereotype that writing occurs only in solitary, undisturbed conditions. Sylvia depicts Plath noisily throwing a rubber ball against her ceiling and chanting loudly to sound-out syllabic patterns and later shows Hughes arriving back from a long bike ride to announce, “I got a poem, a good one,” thus associating writing with activity, commotion and open spaces and projecting it as a kind of adventure.

This disintegration of the line between the artist’s physical and imaginative worlds occurs in The Hours when, as discussed in the previous chapter, the story of ‘Mrs Dalloway’ runs in parallel with the depiction of Woolf writing the novel. Woolf’s actual world invades the world of her characters when, during the writing process, she is struck by a moment of inspiration in which she decides it will be Septimus Smith and not Mrs Dalloway herself who commits suicide. The physical effect of this thought is shown simply, by Kidman’s Woolf looking to the ceiling with a sudden jolt to insinuate the sudden ‘attack’ of the idea as she mutters beneath her breath, “The poet will die. The visionary.” In terms of its portrayal in Woolf’s physical world therefore, this nodal point in the novel is expressed by a slight shift in the writer’s facial expression and one line spoken softly. However, as Kidman delivers this line the barriers between the three narrative strands collapses and the words are shown to have an arresting effect on both the Story and Reader plots. Richard, the biopic’s embodiment of Septimus Smith, decides to take his own life by jumping from a window, an allusion to the death of the original character who falls from a window onto railings. Also, Laura Brown, who has swallowed sleeping pills with the intention of taking her own life is effectively ‘saved’ by the line, which dictates who will die. The room in which the character is passing away is filling rapidly with torrents of furious water, a visual metaphor indicating the invasion of the overdose in Laura’s body and alluding to Woolf’s own suicide by drowning. After the line is delivered, the water, just about to consume its victim, drains away suddenly and the character revives. The line therefore, is shown to act a catalyst which both saves and destroys. By giving the Woolf character such control over the other narratives involved in the film and allowing one line she writes to abruptly alter the outcome of plots and manipulate the actions of the reader-character, the film’s projection of the author is one that disputes Roland Barthes’ notion that the author is “dead” in the sense that they are absent from the texts they have written. Instead, The Hours projects Woolf as an authoritative and active presence who, in a position equivalent to a God or puppeteer, may alter the behaviours of her characters and more radically her readers, who in Barthesian terms would possess more power to generate what they themselves consider to be the text’s ‘meaning,’ unlike Laura Brown whose life is shown to be dependent on Woolf’s narrative decisions. The author here, is portrayed as a controlling and instrumental agent. Although entry into such Word Worlds has become more popular as a means of dramatising the writing of the biopic subject and exploring their inner life, (with films such as Finding Neverland, (2004) a study of the life of J.M Barrie, showing ‘real-life’ figures interacting with the fictional characters they created when actual worlds penetrate imagined parallel universes) neither Sylvia or Iris attempt to smear the frontiers between their subject’s actual and imagined spheres. As such, the biopics convey the writing produced by the women using alternative approaches.

As mentioned in the previous chapter, Plath’s literary estate as headed by Olwyn Hughes, Ted Hughes’ sister, instated various limitations on the makers of Sylvia which prohibited the biopic from using the writers’ own words freely. Such obstacles have been encountered by many of Plath’s biographers and as such the restrictions placed on the film were not unusual. However, the consumers of literary biographies detailing Plath’s life are more likely to have a specific interest in the poet and her writing and will bring this knowledge into their reading, whereas the biopic’s audience come to the film text with a more varied understanding of Plath’s work. Being that audiences were attracted to the film not solely because of the figure of Plath but due to other factors, including the cultural value assigned to the cast and the marketing scheme used, which emphasised a conventional love story in order to appeal to demographics magnetised towards the romance genre, it was essential to communicate a sense of Plath’s writing in spite of the constraints set in place.

Although being primarily concerned with its depiction of the relationship between Plath and Hughes, Sylvia uses a three pronged approach to express the style, content and processes involved in Plath’s writing. These strategies are; the use of dramatisation, in which episodes depicted in Plath’s poetry are refigured and transposed into performance. The use of recitation, in which Paltrow’s Plath performs work by other writers, the substance of which reflects Plath’s own art. And finally the use of collage, in which short lines from different examples of Plath’s poetry are spliced together, merging to form giddying compilations of her work transmitted via voiceover. The biopic’s most palpable adoption of the ‘dramatisation technique’ occurs in the scene in which, after discovering Hughes’ affair, Plath constructs a fire and proceeds to burn the letters revealing his infidelity. This scene visualises the story told in Plath’s poem ‘Burning the Letters’ and demonstrates the filmmakers’ cinematic portrayal of the writing they were prevented from citing directly through quotation. The scene functions dually to both forward the biopic’s narrative when it is cross-cut with the action of the Hughes character sleeping with the character representative of Assia Wevill in a summarisation of the events of their affair and symbolically to allude to the poem emblematic of Plath’s feelings when this betrayal was unconcealed. As such, the sequence operates intertextually by commenting on a poem which exists outside the capsule of the film text in which the scene it is situated. The content of Plath’s work is, therefore, made active during this sequence, only less explicitly than in the dramatisation of ‘Mrs Dalloway’ in The Hours, as only members of the audience familiar with Plath’s writing will fully realise the scene’s imitation of the poem. Nevertheless, the inclusion of the poem’s dramatisation also acts to convey a sense of Plath’s writing to spectators unaware of the original text as the tone of and images within the subject’s poetry are reconstructed visually within the film’s mise en scene. The poem imagines that the fragments of the letters which are destroyed, “would flutter off, black and glittering, they would be coal angels.” The oxymoronic coupling of ‘terrible-beauty’ in this line is replicated in the scene, with its projection of the fire as both destructive and liberating and the expression on Paltrow’s-Plath’s face which infers that she cannot bear to watch the sacrificial flames and yet is at the same time hypnotised and enchanted by their movements. Both the poem and the scene which mimics it parody conventions of ‘love’ and ‘romance’ that are prevalent in literary and cinematic history. ‘Burning the Letters’ is constructed of a series of sonnet length stanzas which, given that the sonnet form is emblematic of ‘love poetry’ and yet the poem records the destruction of this emotion, is viciously ironic. A similar contradiction is evident in the biopic, which to begin with uses signifiers of the romance genre such as stirring violin music, images of clear blue skies and scenes where the couple dance barefoot on an idyllic beach. This narrative, which manufactures the expectation of a happy ending is subverted when the relationship between Plath and Hughes begins to fray and the biopic’s semiotic language shifts and is infiltrated by contrastingly grey, thunderous skies and other signs of despair and disintegration. To refer again, to Maurois’ concept of biographical shadows-phantoms, it seems then that Sylvia attempts to comes closer to an accurate interpretation of Plath through the use of scenes that effectively ‘shadow’ or mimic her poetry. The reconstruction of her poetry through the scenes which reference it, as opposed to the use of direct verbal quotation, is crucial to the biopic’s impersonation of Plath in which her poetry is re-wrought into a more theatrical form.

An example of an earlier literary biopic which had the privilege of being able to quote its subject’s writing openly is Stevie (1978) – a life picture based on the poet Stevie Smith who is played by Glenda Jackson. Direct address is used to break the illusion of a forth wall separating the character and audience, when Jackson abruptly jolts into animated performances of Smith’s poetry, disrupting the duologue between her and her aunt which tells the story of Smith’s life. Often hurtling through the pieces at an immense speed, the poetry is delivered in a style reminiscent of the performance of Beat poetry that was popularised by artists such as Allen Ginsberg and Laurence Ferlinghetti throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The performance of Beat poetry placed an emphasis on spontaneity and this is evoked in the biopic to suggest that much of Smith’s work came to her unprompted and impulsively as the recitations interject into the main narrative arch suddenly, often with a stabbing brutally. Although Smith herself lead a very different existence to the lives of most poets emblematic of the Beat movement, the allusion to their performance style in the biopic infers a shared ethos of poetic freedom underlined by the desire to liberate language from the page and give it a space on the stage (or screen) in recital. As T.V.F Brogan asserts, “poetry achieves its body only when given material form as sound, in the air, aloud” and the biopic seems to adhere to this notion with its concentration on Smith’s work in performance. The poems selected correlate with the moments in the narrative which they interrupt, commenting on the period in Smith’s life which is being described by either the filmic representation of her self or her aunt. For instance the lines “I sat upright in my baby carriage / And wished mama hadn’t made such a foolish marriage,” from the poem ‘Papa Love Baby,’ are delivered sharply by Jackson when she recounts a distant memory of her father. The sense of contempt Smith felt towards the man is conveyed in the poet’s own words but with the actress’ vocal intonation, tempo and inflection, the actress’ choice of stance, facial expression and body language – making the delivery of the poem an act which is both autobiographical and at the same time biographical.

Initially, the permission for filmmakers to use their biographical subject’s own writing at their liberty seems to present an improved chance of capturing an individual’s shadow-phantom, however the case is less simplistic. The extensive use of Smith’s own voice in Stevie through the direct quotation of the subject’s poetry presents a danger, as the film becomes both biographical and autobiographical with the merger of the fictionalised screenplay and the poet’s original texts. The audience’s awareness that the poetry delivered in the biopic belongs to the writer herself may encourage them to perceive the fictionalised script which runs along side it, as also expressive of the writer’s subjective view of their society and own life, regardless of that fact that it is written by a different author. The fundamental theory on which all autobiography is based, (although flawed as any self telling the story of their own life selects what is told and presents only one version, as is the case with biography) is Phillip Lejeune’s concept of an Autobiographical Pact, a ‘contract’ formed between the author and reader asserting the ‘fact’ of a common identity between the author, narrator and protagonist of a text. By blurring the distinctions between autobiography and biography Stevie illuminates the instability of Lejeune’s pact but risks falsely directing its audience to view the entire film as a projection of Smith’s own subjective position. Conversely, Sylvia uses the words of other writers to analyse and elucidate on the events portrayed in Plath’s life. The idea of the classical love story is epitomised in the pair’s recitation of a passage from ‘Romeo and Juliet’ during a scene depicting an early stage in their relationship. Performed as a passionate, heated duet with a dizzying speed similar to the recitations in Stevie, the piece grimly foreshadows the biopic’s tragic ending and situates the couple as doomed lovers to be mythologized after death. Plath’s own voice is implied in the visual dramatisations of her poetry and the teasingly short clips of her writing that the filmmakers were actually allowed to use. These lines are poured into jagged, nonsensical sound-collages of her voice constructed to insinuate a rapid out pouring of words so as to suggest ideas of inspiration, creative impulse, or the arrival of the poet’s muse. Sinyard puts forward that literary biopics have a “tendency to expose the limitations of the cinema’s capacity for filming thought” arguing that although the biopic can “visualise the product of that thought; it is harder to visualise the germination of an idea.” Both Stevie and Sylvia attempt to depict thoughts and the evolution of ideas by sudden transitions from ‘standard’ or ‘normal’ speech to the use of poetic, lyrical language. William Wordsworth described poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” and both biopics, through the use of continuity editing which infers that the conversions between different registers of speech are seamless, achieve this sense of an onslaught of words and emotions ambushing the writer.

The recited passages which are delivered in Sylvia are drawn predominantly from Shakespeare and Chaucer and reflect on the moment of the life in which they are performed. Similarly in a way, to the convention of poetry readings as a means of eulogising at funerals, the biopic associates the action of recitation with feelings of heightened intensity, such as the moment Hughes and Plath are shown to first fall in love and a scene in which they come close to drowning at sea. This use of recitation elevates the idea of poetry and suggests that other modes of communication would fail to express such strong emotions. At times it seems that the biopic is desperate to use a particular example of Plath’s own work and in these instances in the film the reciting of others appears to be a reluctantly implemented substitute. During such moments the work recited seems to allude strongly to the poem the filmmakers would have used had permission been granted. For example, in the scene where the poet couple nearly drown, Paltrow’s Plath recites the following lines from Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest.’ “Full fathom five my father lies / of his bones are coral made / those were pearls that were his eyes.” As with the case of certain members of the audience recognising the visual references to ‘Burning the Letters’ in the poem’s dramatisation, those more familiar with Plath’s work will identify that the lines from ‘The Tempest’ relate strongly to her own poem ‘Full Fathom Five.’ This affiliation between the two texts relies not only on the borrowing of Plath’s title from the play, but is underlined in the biopic by the fact that, as the ocean becomes more turbulent the Plath character begins to tell Hughes about her father’s death and the poem ‘Full Fathom Five’ is itself is a description of a father’s death at sea. The biopic mimics the poem which mimics the play which is itself also referenced in the biopic, creating an intricate intertextual web. The scene also functions to foreshadow the major conflict in the film which is closely followed by the depiction of Plath’s suicide, the thought of which is conjured in the poem’s last line which reads mournfully, “I would breathe water,” which, as the poem is alluded to through Shakespeare and not directly cited, only the audience aware of the piece would grasp. Such interactions between the texts recited and Plath’s own work help imbue the biopic with the rhythms and patterns of poetic language, creating a complex tangling of various literary voices but not fully establishing an impression of the writer’s own art.

The writers the Plath character recites in Sylvia are indicative of the material she read as part of her education rather than her own personal choices in literature. According to Steven Axelrod, “Whereas in early life she and her mother read many woman writers, and whereas in her later life she discovered innumerable other women writers of her own, her formal education has taught her to admire canonised authors who were normatively white and male.” It could be argued that the use of the parallels drawn between Plath’s work and that belonging to writers such as Shakespeare and Chaucer acts to situate Plath firmly within the canon of western literature which such figures dominate. However, the character’s recitation of only male writers and the film’s exclusion of all women writers precursing Plath is troubling as it negates a female literary history. Elaine Showalter urges that women writers and their work should be free from “the linear absolutes of male literary history” and continues, “stop trying to fit women writers between the lines of a male tradition.” If successful, films depicting the lives of women writers should further the work of Gynocritics in constructing a female literary history, however this ideal is often challenged or undermined by phallocentric languages and codes that are heavily engrained within both cinema and literature, the hybrid of which forms the literary biopic.

A trait of the biopic which Sinyard mocks in his study as the characteristic of biographical films to be most parodied, is the instance of ‘name-dropping.’ Although the often fleeting inclusion of other artists in a literary biopic can appear pretentious, decorative or forced, in Devotion (1946) a study of the Brontë sisters for example, there is a line which goes, “Good morning Thackeray. Good morning, Dickens,” the depiction of or allusion to other female writers can assist in communicating the idea of the biopic subject’s female literary antecedents. Gilbert and Gubar point out, “the loneliness of the female artist, her feelings of alienation from male predecessors coupled with her need for sisterly precursors and successors,” highlighting once again the importance of the study and portrayal of the female literary tradition. Becoming Jane begins to illustrate the lineage of women writers when Austen, awestruck, meets Radclyffe Hall and the pair briefly discuss the difficulties faced by female writers in their male dominated sphere. The meeting of the female writers and the scene’s positioning of Hall as an influential, nurturing force represents a turn away from the tendency for biopic’s of female artists “to crystallise around the woman artist’s relationship with a (usually older) male artist doubling as mentor and lover,” a scenario which perpetuates the myth of writing being a masculine act as it suggests any female hoping to follow the creative path must be instructed by a male.

With its focus on the writer’s ability to exist outside of the society in which they lived, transcending history and ‘surviving’ through their words, The Hours also articulates the fact of a female literary tradition as the character of Laura Brown who is shown to be influenced enormously by Woolf’s writing, is in fact based on the figure of Plath who Axelrod asserts “took Virginia Woolf as a model very early in her career.” The Hours acknowledges frameworks and methods of writing developed by women and rejects the idea that female writers must be sutured into a normative male tradition. Daldry has spoken of this comparison of the Laura Brown character with Plath, stating that the likeness between the character and poet manifests dramatically in the habit of obsessively creating perfect cakes in an attempt to fit the role of an ‘ideal’ housewife. Laura Brown creates a pristine birthday cake for her husband, throws it away and promptly begins again, believing only complete perfection is adequate enough. Sylvia also explores the idea of domesticity, displaying Plath’s habit of frantically baking and cleaning whenever she encountered difficulties in writing, a frustration expressed when Paltrow’s Plath says to the Hughes character, “You got out for a bike ride and come back with an epic in hexameters. I sit down to write and I get a bake sale.” Iris uses the increasing disorder and untidiness of the house to symbolise the increasingly disrupted state of Murdoch’s mind as her disease progresses and Stevie involves one scene in which the poet and her aunt argue over who will wipe up a glass of spilt milk. The biopic’s shared theme of domesticity can be seen to allude to Woolf’s hypothesis that, had Shakespeare had a sister equally as talented at writing as himself she would have been denied an outlet for her art solely because of her sex. Rosemary Reisman simplifies Woolf’s theory on Judith Shakespeare as follows, “Her plays would never have been performed, and if she did not escape from her own frustrations through madness or suicide, Shakespeare’s sister would probably have become one of those peculiar women who lived in isolation and were suspected of being witches.” The biopics can be seen to illustrate the expectation that women writers should conform to the roles patriarchy allocates them, and emphasise how these roles conflict with the desire and need to write. A conformity to traditionally conjugal roles is generally projected as damaging to the production of art, Sylvia record Plath’s sudden gale of creativity after the end of her marriage when she is when she is shown to stop washing and start writing, The Hours depicts Woolf rejecting her doctor and husband’s demands that she should rest in the country by adamantly returning to London where she feels more inspired and Iris suggests that Murdoch’s affairs contributed to the development of her voice and inspired elements of her characters and plots. Gilbert and Gubar put forward that “a woman writer must examine, assimilate and transcend the extreme images of ‘angel’ and ‘monster’ which male authors have generated for her.” In order for a literary biopic to successfully capture the shadow-phantoms of the female writers they portray, the films should examine how the subject negotiated between these different masks (and other identities) and not situate the subject within one of these firm extremes as this risks propagating stereotypes of what a female writer must be.

In the children’s classic ‘Peter Pan,’ Pan’s shadow often behaves differently to the body to which it belongs, symbolising how external, physical actions may not accurately express the internal activities of the mind. The mind may be frantic and shifting although the body is still, a fact that all biopics should attempt to capture in order to convey both the inner and outer lives of their subject. A biopic has the capacity to portray both the stillness of the writer writing, and the gymnastic, vigorous movements of the imagination, as is achieved in The Hours by the dramatisation of Woolf’s novel set beside the exploration of Woolf’s everyday life. Looking at a range of methods available for structuring biopics suggested that a multidimensional approach not privileging one interpretation of the individual but exploring multiple sides of their self is an effective way of hunting the biographical shadow-phantoms Maurois speaks of. Similarly, a portrayal of a writer explorative of both their ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ or ‘physical’ and ‘imaginative’ lives will bring a biopic closer to trapping the darting, tricky shadows which go to comprise one life.

Conclusion: Casting Shadows

“And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They 'd probably put my head in a guillotine
But it 's alright, Ma, it 's life, and life only” - Bob Dylan

In a poem expressing her abhorrence towards the biopic depicting her mother’s life and a judgement of the audience who went to see it, Frieda Plath writes:

“Now they want to make a film
For anyone lacking the ability
To imagine the body, head in oven
Orphaning children.

The peanut eaters, entertained
At my mother’s death, will go home
Each carrying their memory of her,
Lifeless – a souvenir.
Maybe they’ll buy the video.”

This piece illuminates the more voyeuristic side of biographical film as was discussed in ‘Arranging Their Skeletons,’ and raises complex ethical questions inherent in the production of all texts illustrative of real lives. Famous, influential and exceptional figures from all spheres of life become a part of history and as such the public has a right to discourses which record their actions, ideas and effects on society. The portrayal of life or the ensnaring of biographical shadow-phantoms is a delicate procedure however, and the biographer should be sensitive towards the individual whose life they adapt and to the families and others who surrounded the biographical subject in question as they too are likely to be involved in the retelling of the story. The poem goes on to suggests that the biopic commodifies and manufactures a version of Plath that freezes the poet within the conditions of her death, asserting that the biopic constructs a “Sylvia Suicide Doll.” Are audiences more drawn by the promise of life or that of death?

In a biopic, the shadow-phantom of an individual subject tends to be reconstructed through a succession of symbols indicative of certain stereotypes, their life configured using often generic structures adopting the codes of genres through which their story is filtered. However, significant developments have been made since the production of biopics symptomatic of Hollywood’s studio era and contemporary filmmakers, instead of remoulding the lives they portray to fit the patterns of conventional biopic frameworks are more likely to formulate structures which will most effectively capture the shadow-phantom of an individual. More extensive studies emulative of Custen’s original and incorporating a wider range of the biopics produced within an era are called for to ascertain what biographical cinema communicates about and to the society in which we live.

Writers such as Plath, Woolf, Murdoch, Smith and Austen are vital voices within the female literary canon and, they must not be marginalised by their sex, the literary canon as a far reaching whole. Their lives should be documented and preserved in biographical texts in order to conserve and continue the various histories in which they participate and biopics concentrating on their existences enable their lives to touch a wider audience than literary biographies alone. Certain individuals have been portrayed in multiple biographies and these duplicate, wildly differing and often dissonant impressions of a single person prove a biography stands as just one version of a life from many possible variations. Writers are not specimens in a museum to be displayed behind glass, mummified or enshrined in amber forever trapped in one position. As this essay has argued, each portrayal of their lives in a biographical interpretation is representative of just one version of life, none of which is a definitive account. No biographical portrait is entirely authentic or emblematic of the subject’s entire self, or perhaps more truthfully, emblematic of all the selves within one human.

Bibliography

Books and Articles

- Axelrod, Steven. The Wound and the Cure of Words. (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. 1990.)

- Barrie, J.M. Peter Pan and other plays. (Oxford: Oxford University Press.

- Barnes, Julian. Flaubert’s Parrot. (London: Picador. 1985.)

- Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf – A Biography. (London: The Hogarth Press. 1972.)

- Bennett, Andrew and Royal, Nicholas. Literature, Criticism and Theory. (3rd ed. London: Pearson. 2004.)

- Bingham, Dennis. I do want to live! Female Voices, Male Discourse and Hollywood Biopics (In: Cinema Journal Issue 38 Spring, 1999)

- Bloom, Harold. Iris Murdoch. (New Haven: Chelsea House. 1986.)

- Bloom, Harold. Sylvia Plath. (New York: Chelsea House. 1988.)

- Brennan, Claire. Ed. Sylvia Plath – A reader’s guide to essential criticism. (Cambridge: Icon. 2000.)

- Brogan, T.V.F. The New Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms. (New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 1994.)

- Chester, Phyllis. Women and Madness. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2005.)

- Cook, Pam and Dodd, Phillip. Ed. Women and Film – A Sight and Sound Reader. (London: Scarlet Press. 1993.)

- Cohen, Keith. Film and Fiction – The Dynamics of Exchange. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 1979.)

- Conradi, Peter. Iris Murdoch – The Saint and the Artist. (London: Macmillan. 1986.)

- Cook, Pam. Monthly Film Bulletin. (February 1985)

- Coppola, Don. Bringing Historical Characters to Life: An interview with Stephen J. Ruele (In: Cineaste Issue 27. Spring 2002)

- Crane, Richard. Thunder – A Play of the Brontes. (London: Heinemann. 1976.)

- Custen, George F. Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (New Jersey: Rutgers University press. 1992.)

- Custen, George F. The Mechanical Life in the Age of Human Reproduction – American Biopic 1961 – 1980. (Biography 23.1. 2000. p. 127 – 159.)

- de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. (London: Random House. 1997.)

- Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. ( London : Penguin. 2001.)

- Didion, Joan. The Year of Magical Thinking. (London: Harper. 2006.)

- Didion, Joan. The Year of Magical Thinking. A play based on her memoir. (New York: Vintage. 2007.)

- Evans, Mary. Missing Persons: The impossibility of Auto/biography. (London: Routledge.
1999.)

- Feldman, Irving. The Religion of One. (In Book Week. 19th June 1966)

- French, Philip and Wlaschin, Ken. Movie Verse. (London: Faber and Faber. 1993.)

- Giannetti, Louis. Understanding Movies. (10th ed. New Jersey: Pearson Education. 1993.)

- Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan. The Madwoman in the Attic – The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination. (2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2000.)

- Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper (London: Viagro Press. 1981.)

- Gustafson, Richard. The Vogue of the Screen Biography (In Film and History. Issue 33, 1977.)

- Hayward, Susan. Cinema Studies – The Key Concepts. (London: Routledge. 2000.)

- Heath, Stephen. Image, Music, Text. (London: Fontana. 1977.)

- Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Writing a Woman’s Life. (London: The Women’s Press. 1989.)

- Hollows, Joanne and Jancovich, Mark. Ed. Approaches to Popular Film. (Manchester: Manchester University Press. 1995.)

- Kaufmann, Walter. The Portable Nietzsche. 1980. New York : Random House.

- King, Caroline. Sylvia Plath. (Boston: Twayne. 1978.)

- Lee, Hermoine. Body Parts: Essays on Life Writing. (London: Chatto and Windus. 2005.)

- Lejeune, Phillipe. On Autobiography. (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press. 1989.)

- Magill, Frank N. ed. Great Women Writers. (London: Salem Press. 1994.)

- Malcom, Janet. The Silent Woman. (London: Granta. 2005.)

- Marcus, Laura. Auto/Biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice. (Manchester: Manchester University Press. 1994.)

- Maurois, André. Aspects of Biography. (New York: Frederick Ungar. 1966.)

- Mepham, John. Virginia Woolf – A Literary Life. (London: Macmillan. 1991.)

- Metz, Christian. A Semiotics of the Cinema – Film Language. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1991.)

- Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. (Screen. 16.3. Autumn. 1975. p. 6 – 18.)

- Murdoch, Iris. The Black Prince. (London: Vintage. 2006.)

- Murdoch. Iris. The Sea, The Sea. (London:Vintage. 1999.)

- Murdoch, Iris. The Unicorn. (London: Vintage. 2000.)

- Murphy, Mary A. Model Lives – The Social Value of Filmed Art Lives. (Kinema - http://www.kinema.uwaterloo.ca/murph041.htm 12.1.2004)

- Nadel, Ira Bruce. Biography – Fiction, Fact and Form. (London: Macmillan. 1984.)

- Neale, Steve. Genre and Contemporary Hollywood. (London: BFI. 2002.)

- Nelson, William. Fact or Fiction – The Dilemma. (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1973.)

- O’Connor, Ulick. Biographers and the art of Biography. (London: Quartet Books. 1993.)

- Olney, James. ed. Studies in Autobiography. (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1988.)

- Plath, Sylvia. Ariel – The Restored Edition. (London: Faber and Faber. 2004.)

- Plath, Sylvia. Collected Poems. (London: Faber and Faber. 1981.)

- Plath, Sylvia. Letters Home. (London: Faber and Faber. 1976.)

- Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. (London: Faber and Faber. 1966.)

- Pratchett, Terry. It could be worse, It could be my wife. (The Independent on Sunday. 16th March 2008. P.47.)

- Reid, Su. Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. (Lodon: Macmillan. 1993.)

- Rice, Phillip and Waugh, Patricia. Modern Literary Theory. (4th ed. London: Arnold. 2001.)

- Sands, Sarah. Terry Pratchett’s Long Voyage into the Darkness. (The Independent. 16th December 2007. P.41.)

- Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady. (New York: Pantheon Books. 1985.)

- Sinyard, Neil. Filming Literature – The art of screen adaptation. (London: British Library. 1986)

- Smith, Stevie. Novel on Yellow Paper. (London: Virago. 1980.)

- Smith, Stevie. Selected Poems. (London: Penguin. 2002.)

- Spence, Donald. Narrative Truth and Historical Truth. (New York: Norton 1982.)

- Stanley, Liz. The auto/biographical I: The theory and practice of feminist auto/biography. (Manchester: Manchester University Press. 1922.)

- Stape, J.H. ed. Virginia Woolf: Interviews and Recollections. (London: Macmillan. 1995.)

- Szymborska, Wislawa. Nobel Lecture, 2006. (Trans. Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh. As published on Nobel e- Museum. www.nobel.se)

- Turim, Maureen. Flashbacks in Film. (New York: Routledge. 1989.)

- Van Dyne, Susan. The Problem of Biography. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2006.)

- Vidal, Belén. Feminist historiographies and the woman artist’s biopic – The case of Artemisia. (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2007.)

- Wagner, Linda. Sylvia Plath – The Critical Heritage. (New York: Routledge. 1988.)

- Wainwright, Jeffrey. Poetry – The Basics. (London: Routledge. 2004.)

- White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse. (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. 1978.)

- Wilson, Jamie. Freida Hughes attacks BBC for film on Plath. (The Guardian. 3rd February, 2003. Also published on www.guardian.co.uk/media/2003/feb/03/bbc/film.)

- Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. (London: Vintage. 2004.)

- Woolf, Virginia. Jacob’s Room. (London: Vintage. 2004.)

- Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. (Annotated Ed. London: Penguin Classics. 2000.)

- Woolf, Virginia. Orlando. (Annotated Ed. London: Penguin Classics. 2000.)

- Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. (London: The Hogarth Press. 1931.)

- Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2000.)

- Woolf, Virginia. Women and Writing. (London: The Women’s Press. 1910.)

- Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. (Berkley: University of California Press. 1986.)

Film

- Bernhardt, Curtis. Dir. Devotion. (Warner Bros. 1946)

- Bright, Matthew. Dir. Ted Bundy. (First Look, 2002) Screenplay by Stephen Johnston

- Daldry, Stephen. Dir. The Hours. (Paramount Pictures and Mirimax Films, 2003) Screenplay by David Hare.

- Enders, Robert. Dir. Stevie. (Samuel Goldwyn Studio, 1978)

- Eyre, Richard. Dir. Iris. (Mirimax Films and BBC Films, 2002) Screenplay by Richard Eyre and Charles Wood.

- Forster, Marc. Dir. Finding Neverland. (Walt Disney Studios, 2004 ) Screenplay by David Magee.

- Jarrold, Julian. Dir. Becoming Jane. (Ardmore Studios, 2007) Screenplay by Kevin Hood

- Jeffs, Christine. Dir. Sylvia. (Ariel Films and UK Film Council, 2003) Screenplay by John Brownlow.

- Jenkins, Patty. Dir. Monster. (Media 8 entertainment, 2003.)