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Laurence Raw. Adapting Henry James to the Screen: Gender, Fiction, and Film. Landham: Scarecrow, 2006. 297 pp. $50.00 (paperback).
For someone who sought and did not find success in the theater, Henry James has nevertheless proved a remarkably bankable producer of screen treatments. Despite its fabled difficulty, his work has been persistently attractive to screenwriters and directors, who have devoted their attention to its cinematic and televisual potential for many decades-indeed, for about seven decades, according to Laurence Raw. In his book on Jamesian adaptations, Raw ranges from 1933, the year of the earliest screen version of The Sense of the Past, to 2001, when the Merchant-Ivory production of The Golden Bowl was released. The twenty-three rather short chapters comprising this book canvass twenty-seven adaptations of the Master, all of them produced for Anglo-American consumption.
Raw distinguishes his approach to the subject of adaptation from other studies by stressing his book's departure from formalism, something he associates with a fixation on the screen work's fidelity to the literary text. Instead, he concentrates on a number of features that constitute the "context" of any screen work: the period of a film or television show's production, the influence of production codes and censorship, and the specific conditions of studio production. Most important, Raw focuses on the ways in which various adaptations have taken up James's own interest in gender ideology, tracking the representation of gender roles and, in particular, of female sexuality through the thickets of Hollywood studio era repression and into the putative openness of post-studio independent film and television production. Among other elements, Raw also identifies narrative style as one of the means by which directors achieve a "feminizing" of an adaptation, further drawing our attention to matters of gender. He concludes the introduction by stating two goals for the book: showing that in James filmmakers find material allowing them to "comment on the present through the past" and demonstrating that cinema enabled James to find the popular audience he craved (13). Neither of these statements is really news to those who might pick up this book. The first observation-that adaptations...