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Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall(s) and the Circulation of Cultural Prestige

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Adaptation, Awards Culture, and the Value of Prestige

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture ((PSADVC))

Abstract

Hilary Mantel’s best-selling and prize-winning novels Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up The Bodies (2012) are exemplary texts in the recent development of high-culture historical fiction and in the centrality of adaptive processes to cultural production and consumption. They belong to a long-denigrated genre which is inherently adaptive, and which is currently shifting its cultural position from mass popularity towards cultural respectability. This process is central to the novels’ adaptation for stage and screen. In both adaptations, the transmission of cultural prestige between institutions and art forms is a central concern, as is revealed by authorial involvement, the broad cultural framing and institutional reception of the adaptations, and their use of formal techniques as indicators of prestige.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Leon Edel’s edition of Henry James’ letters has “essence” rather than “absence”; as this makes no sense I follow Rachel Cohen’s transcription.

  2. 2.

    I do not wish to simplify the complex relationship between popularity and prestige, but in these instances there is a comparable link between popularity and diminished cultural status. James F. English (2016) has presented empirical evidence of a shift in the prestige and popularity of historical fiction. From roughly the 1980s, high-prestige (defined in relation to prize culture) fiction began to use historical settings with increasing frequency. Best-selling novels, on the other hand, used historical settings less frequently (406–411). Mantel’s return to historical fiction is part of this process.

  3. 3.

    Both novels won other prizes. That this is less well-known is indicative of the “single-winner axiom that underpins the entire prize economy” (English 2005, 199).

  4. 4.

    For a summary of the controversy surrounding the historic present see Christopher Howse’s (2014) “Halt the clash of the grammar titans.” For a discussion of the disputes regarding Mantel’s depiction of Thomas More, see Vanessa Thorpe’s (2015) “Thomas More is the villain of Wolf Hall. But is he getting a raw deal?”

  5. 5.

    Mantel’s (2013b) description of the Duchess of Cambridge as “a shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own” whose “point and purpose” is “to give birth” inflamed the tabloid press, which chose to misinterpret her comments as “a bitter attack” on an individual rather than an observation on the nature of an institution and a culture’s relationship to it.

  6. 6.

    Murray’s approach is inflammatory to the sensibilities of those influenced, at whatever remove, by romantic notions of authorial genius and convinced of the aesthetic and ethical value of the novel as a form. It sounds not just strange but horrifying to speak of a novel as a “content package” or “an IP rights bundle and potential content franchise” (26; 36). Murray’s point, however, is that these are the terms in which many of the key institutional players think in the age of media conglomerates, and to ignore this fact is to misunderstand the system from which our most beloved and revered cultural products emerge (33).

  7. 7.

    When staged in America, the plays were billed as Wolf Hall Parts One & Two.

  8. 8.

    Historically, page-to-stage adaptation has been very common, and it still occurs. For another contemporary example, see Chapter 5, this volume.

  9. 9.

    Mantel is perhaps exaggerating the “difference” of her situation. Dorothy L. Sayers’ Busman’s Honeymoon (1937) was adapted from a play of the same name. George R. R. Martin’s The Winds of Winter will also be adapting material from the HBO television series Game of Thrones (2011–).

  10. 10.

    This, too, has aroused controversy. While there is a firm basis in revisionist historiography for Mantel’s Cromwell (most notably the work of G. R. Elton), some historians have been outraged by the depiction: David Starkey has called it – without reading the novels or seeing the adaptations – “a deliberate perversion of fact” (Furness 2015). See Mark Horowitz (2011) for an even-handed treatment.

  11. 11.

    The question of the RSC’s reputation is not as simple as this implies. While it has enjoyed considerable prestige as both an “unstuffy and even radical” contributor to theatrical experimentation and as “an ambassador of socially sanctioned art,” in recent years it has suffered from the general “decline in prestige” of classical theatre (Chambers 2004, 44; xii; 188). Nonetheless, the RSC is associated with the same sort of institutionalized, official culture as the Booker, making their exchange of symbolic capital relatively unproblematic.

  12. 12.

    One might be forgiven for asking how daring the adaptation of such hugely successful novels really is.

  13. 13.

    The stage and television adaptations of Wolf Hall do not participate in an intertextual relationship, even in terms of reception. The play opened in New York at the same time as the series aired on PBS, but the little comparative criticism extant focuses on difference: Ben Brantley (2015), for instance, describes the television series as “moody, leisurely works, steeped in darkness,” while the stage version is “just for fun.”

  14. 14.

    This reverence is also apparent within the series: note the lingering shots of richly illuminated manuscripts and other paraphernalia of writing.

  15. 15.

    A more recent example is Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s The Revenant (2015), shot, as was widely reported, almost exclusively with natural light (Riley 2015).

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  1. Department of English, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong

    Eric Sandberg

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  1. Eric Sandberg
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Correspondence to Eric Sandberg .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Communication and Design, Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey

    Colleen Kennedy-Karpat

  2. Department of English, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong

    Eric Sandberg

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Sandberg, E. (2017). Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall(s) and the Circulation of Cultural Prestige. In: Kennedy-Karpat, C., Sandberg, E. (eds) Adaptation, Awards Culture, and the Value of Prestige. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52854-0_4

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