| dc.description.abstract | This research explores the representation of female characters in classical Hollywood screwball comedy films and their often-obscured source material. The examination of both the original comedic literature and the film adaptation results in new perspectives on the agency and characterization of female characters in screwball comedies. Five films – Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey, Alfred Santell’s Breakfast for Two, Ernst Lubitsch’s Design for Living, Howard Hawk’s His Girl Friday and W. S. Van Dyke’s The Thin Man –and their respective source texts – Eric Hatch’s “Irene, the Stubborn Girl,” David Garth’s A Love Like That, Noël Coward’s Design for Living, Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s The Front Page, and Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man serve as the foundation for the case studies in this research, with each chapter examining modes of female agency through two different class positions. I argue that by renewing the presence of these original texts it is possible to see that through process of adaptation there is a systematic softening of female characters that appears and results in the tempering of the original character’s personality and agency that dramatically affects her role in the film adaptation. I examine two different class positions: upper-class society and professional middle-class society, in order to explore different modes of female agency for both wealthy and working women. I also delve into how the element of casting introduces a new level of affect that is not present in the literary texts and maintain that it becomes a compensatory act to help the filmic female characters regain part of the agency that is lost in the adaptation process. | en |
