| Abstrakt: |
This article examines the representation of masculinity in twenty-first-century television adaptations of Charlotte and Emily Brontë’s respective novels, Jane Eyre (1847) and Wuthering Heights (1847): the BBC’s 2006 four-part serialization of Jane Eyre (dir. Susanna White) and ITV’s 2009 two-part serialization of Wuthering Heights (dir. Coky Giedroyc). It argues that twenty-first-century television is affording the Brontës’ heroes, Rochester and Heathcliff, freer licence to express sensitive emotions, which are represented as a positive force of their masculinity rather than a site of frailty or impotence. By foregrounding male emotion, the adaptations are participating in wider ideological debates concerning men’s position in a post-feminist world. Importantly, by emphasizing Rochester and Heathcliff’s emotionality, the adaptations are seen to work against Brontean myths and screen legacies that have so often branded them as gothic hero-villains or rakes. This article argues that the representation of emotionally liberated masculinity, particularly in a period where notions of sexual equality and women’s rights are embedded in the social fabric, provides the adaptations with the cultural freedom to present Rochester and Heathcliff through a more sympathetic lens. These characterizations are achieved by centralizing the heroes, softening the contours of their Victorian masculinities (and those depicted in earlier adaptations), and showing that their iniquities are largely the result of their psychological suffering and victimization. In these ways, the heroes’ respective behaviours are reframed as sites of empathy, which abate, in some measure, the cloud of antipathy that has usually followed them to the screen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
