Stephanie Tucker

Bio: Stephanie Tucker is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Illusionism & Verisimilitude. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 2 citations.

Despair Not, Neither to Presume: The French Lieutenant's Woman: A Screenplay

Abstract: Both Magritte's and Pirandello's works involve as their primary subject other works of art. In both, the border between the interior work and the larger reality that surrounds it is obscure, creating a confusion of reality levels. And both raise questions regarding the nature of art and the relationship between reality and representations of reality. . . . while operating within the tradition of illusionistic art, both Pirandello and Magritte subvert that tradition.... they turn illusionism against itself, creating illusions inside illusions, ambiguous structures that confuse the audience and threaten to break down the distinction between life and art. (Gaggi 35-37) Since The French lieutenant's Woman opened in 1981, critics and scholars alike have focused upon its novelistic verisimilitude: Is the movie faithful to John Fowles's book? Specifically, does it successfully convey the novel's '"diachronic' dilemma" (Fowles X)-the result primarily of its metafictional devices? As you will recall, the story of Sarah Woodruff, the "French lieutenant's woman," takes place in mid-Victorian England, but the novel's omniscient narrator is placed firmly in the twentieth century. Never distancing himself from the work-in-progress, he intrudes upon the tale with observations about the past and present, and reflections about the novelist's craft: This story I'm telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind. If I have pretended until now to know my characters' minds and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in ... a convention universally accepted at the time of my story: that the novelist stands next to God. He may not know all, yet he tries to pretend that he does. But I live in the age of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes; if this is a novel, it cannot be a novel in the modern sense of the word. (Fowles 80) By calling attention to his task, Fowles undermines the fiction's powers of illusion. Frederick P.W. McDowell writes that his "commentary approximates the 'alienation effects' used in modern theater, whereby the dramatist interrupts his work to dispel illusion... and to remind his audience that a fiction, not a transposed reality, is being presented" (428). As Barry Olshen points out, one of this novel's subjects "is the contemporary novel itself, or rather the difficult task of writing a contemporary novel" (89). In order to accommodate both modern and mid-Victorian viewpoints, Harold Pinter wrote a twentieth-century frame story whose characters and action parallel Fowles's nineteenth-century one; to reflect this "novel-in-the-making" (Wolfe 127; Olshen 89), the playwright wrote a screenplay about a "film-in-the-making." In the nineteenth-century tale, Sarah Woodruff has a brief affair with Charles Smithson, a Victorian gentleman; in the twentieth century, Anna, the actress playing the role of "Sarah" in a movie titled The French lieutenant's Woman, has an affair with Mike, the actor playing the role of "Charles." Scholars and critics have had mixed reactions to Pinter's solution to the "'diachronic' dilemma." Some, like Joanne Klein and Enoch Brater, find the framing story successful. Klein writes that it "faithfully materializes a legacy of problematic concerns from the novel" (151). More directly, Brater calls Pinter's solution "a clever juxtaposition of manners, plots, and social and sexual mores" (142). Others grow rapturous. Neil Sinyard, for one, pronounces it "a magnificent metaphor" (135). Less enthusiastically, but nonetheless admiringly, Peter Conradi calls Pinter's solution "a curious commentary on a remarkable novel" (56). There exists, however, a less appreciative camp. Reviewing the film when it first opened, Vincent Canby found the contemporary frame to be peculiarly flat. It illuminates nothing more about the differences between the manners and mores of 1867 and 1981 than any reasonably alert 1981 adult might be expected to bring into the movie theater uninstructed. …

Sharp Cut: Harold Pinter's Screenplays and the Artistic Process

Abstract: Best known as one of the most important playwrights of the twentieth century, Harold Pinter has also written many highly regarded screenplays, including Academy Award-nominated screenplays for The French Lieutenant's Woman and Betrayal , collaborations with English director Joseph Losey, and an unproduced script for the remake of Stanley Kubrick's 1962 adaptation of Lolita . In this definitive study of Pinter's screenplays, Steven H. Gale compares the scripts with their sources and the resulting films, analyzes their stages of development, and shows how Pinter creates unique works of art by extracting the essence from his source and rendering it in cinematic terms. Gale introduces each film, traces the events that led to the script's writing, examines critical reaction to the film, and provides an extensive bibliography, appendices, and an index.