Abstract
Illustration, I argue in this chapter, contributes to a given work’s adaptation network by establishing distinctive iconography and by distilling a work to representative scenes, moments, and elements. The aspects of a prose work that illustrators depict (and how they do so) correspond to those similarly reinforced in other illustrated editions as well as in film adaptations. Looking to several sets of illustrations of Henry James’s novellas Daisy Miller and Washington Square and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I consider how similarities in content and tone among the sets suggest a consensus on what “counts” in the work and point to the reiterative process by which the cultural knowledge and memory of a particular work is constructed. This chapter examines some ways in which illustrations in illustrated novels are coded to elicit particular readings that can impact readers’ interpretations of a work by resolving ambiguities or visualizing aspects absent from the prose narrative.
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- 1.
I have explored these ideas elsewhere: see Newell, “‘You don’t know about me without you have read a book’: Authenticity in Adaptations of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Literature/Film Quarterly 41.4 (2013): 303–16; “Illustration, Adaptation and the Development of Frankenstein’s Visual Lexicon,” in Adapting Frankenstein: The Monster’s Eternal Lives in Popular Culture, edited by Dennis Cutchins and Dennis Perry (Manchester University Press, Forthcoming); “Adaptation and Illustration: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach,” in Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, edited by Thomas Leitch (Oxford University Press, Forthcoming); and “What We Talk About When We Talk About Adaptation” (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2006), 1–50.
- 2.
Several writers provide comprehensive overviews of this tendency; see Mitchell (1986) and Elliott (2003), particularly Chapters 1 and 2, which offer a digest of dominant trends of theorizing words and images in interart discourse.
- 3.
Du Maurier’s illustrations first appeared in The Cornhill Magazine (June–November, 1880).
- 4.
Adam Sonstegard also addresses Daisy’s absence from McVickar’s illustrations, but his assessment of the effect differs from my own. He finds that the combination of James’s “tutelarly narration” and McVickar’s “exclusive illustrations gently compel readers to side with” characters that embody conservative social mores and “not with subversives” like Daisy Miller, “Discreetly Depicting ‘an Outrage’: Graphic Illustration and ‘Daisy Miller’’s Reputation,” Henry James Review 29, no. 1 (Winter 2008): 77.
- 5.
McVickar’s 1905 novel, Reptiles, also includes numerous moments of etiquette breaches, which suggests that he sought to further interrogate Daisy Miller’s themes of control and social- and self-policing. With the exception of protagonist Irene North, McVickar’s female characters are, like Daisy, non-conforming, yet, unlike Daisy, they are highly calculating. The contrast between their innocent appearance and covert transgressions of etiquette and Daisy’s transgressive appearance and covert innocence indicates McVickar’s interest in social lines and distinctions between public and private etiquette, as does the advice he offers in his mock etiquette manual Matrimonial Advice (New York: Geo. M. Allen Company, 1893).
- 6.
Charles King comments, “What is remarkable about Stevenson’s central plot premise is that it allows any number of variant themes to be constructed on its basic framework,” “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: A Filmography,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 25, no. 1 (1997): 11. The same is true of Hyde. The ambiguity of Stevenson’s characterization allows for any number of variant characteristics to be grafted onto his basic armature.
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Newell, K. (2017). Imagining the Unimaginable: Illustration as Gateway. In: Expanding Adaptation Networks. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56712-3_3
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