Adapting Victorian Masculinities
Oliver Parker's Dorian Gray (2009) and Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes (2009)
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 13008348 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Nadine Boehm-Schnitker (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 143-164 |
| Publication date | 2015-06-19 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Victoriographies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2044-2416 • E-ISSN: 2044-2424 |
| Publisher | Edinburgh University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.3366/vic.2015.0190 |
| OpenAlex | W753130703 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 19 |
This article explores the construction of masculinities in Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Oliver Parker's Dorian Gray (2009) in the context of neo-Victorian adaptational strategies. Sherlock Holmes enacts a version of adaptation characterised by a recombination of citational fragments taken from Arthur Conan Doyle's stories. Character provides a unifying force, with Holmes and Watson acting as nodal points. Their latent homoeroticism negotiated via homosocial triangulations and the deferral of pleasure within male social bonds is a powerful means of ensuring consumer retention. In that it constitutes a reproduction of Wilde's novel with a difference, Parker's Dorian Gray lives up to a more traditional version of adaptation. It renders sex between men explicit, but tames Dorian's homosexuality in a psychodrama of childhood abuse and the ‘healing’ influence of the New Woman. Within different adaptational strategies, both films reconstruct late-Victorian masculinity by displaying the male characters' physicality, bodily sensuality, and libidinal energies
Aestheticism · Art · Art history · Gray (unit · Pleasure · Psychoanalysis · Watson · Cinema and Media Studies · Crime and Detective Fiction Studies · Psychology · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
| Highly cited | No |
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