An Ankle Queerly turned, or the fetishised bodies in Agatha Christie'sThe Body in the Library

This article takes as its point of departure a fetishistic scene from the 2004 ITV television adaptation of Agatha Christie's The Body in the Library in order to demonstrate (1) how fetishism itself is a form of adaptation and thus how adaptation functions fetishistically; (2) how the fetishism diaplayed in the 2004 adaptation of the The Body in the Library reflexively references a more primal fetishism at work in the ‘original’ text; and (3) how the body in The Body in the Library functions as a screen memory to disavow (both veil and reference) a primal, and otherwise purloined, body. Finally, it is argued that the diegesis proper of The Body in the Library is itself a screen memory, or adaptation, designed to mask the original, transgressive desire of Dolly Bantry

Agatha · Art · Fetishism · Literature · Sociology · Transgressive · Visual arts · Anthropology · Crime and Detective Fiction Studies · Law in Society and Culture · Psychology · Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism