Adaptation Vol. 4, No. 1, pp.

28–37
doi: 10.1093/adaptation/apq011
Advance Access publication 11 August 2010

Adaptation, Fidelity, and Gendered Discourses

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SHELLEY COBB*

Abstract  This article argues that despite the growing and articulate chorus of adaptation scholars
who critique the language of fidelity and its consequential denigration of adaptation as an art form,
some of these contemporary scholars continue to repeat reductive cultural hierarchies and the
binary structure of fidelity criticism. I suggest that where this does happen, it does so because of a
cultural binary that structures the language of fidelity: masculine/feminine. Consequently, critical
discourses of adaptation often utilise a gendered language that constructs a masculine/feminine
hierarchy between novel/film and frames the problems of fidelity and adaptation studies as feminine.

Keywords  Adaptation, gender, fidelity, translation.

Most writing on adaptation as translation, even when it assumes a tone of quasi-scientific

objectivity, betrays certain unexamined ideological concerns because it deals of necessity
with sexually charged materials and cannot avoid a gendered language associated with the notion of
‘fidelity’ (emphasis added).
James Naremore (8)

It is important to move beyond the moralistic and judgmental ideal of ‘fidelity’. At the same
time, we have to acknowledge at the outset that ‘fidelity’, however discredited theoretically,
does retain a grain of experiential truth. Words like ‘infidelity’ and ‘betrayal’. . . translate our
feeling, when we have loved a book, that an adaptation has not been worthy of that love (emphasis added).
Robert Stam (4)

Despite the growing and articulate chorus of adaptation scholars who critique the
language of fidelity and its consequential denigration of adaptation as an art form, this
article argues that some of these contemporary scholars continue to repeat the cultural
values that underpin the binary structure of fidelity criticism. I suggest that where this
does happen, it does so because of a cultural binary that structures the language of
fidelity: masculine/feminine. In the first epigraph, Naremore suggests that one of the
cultural values that shape fidelity criticism is a gendered language that is a result of viewing
adaptations as translation. In ‘The Gendered Language of Fidelity’, I follow the impli-
cations of this statement and, drawing on the work of feminist translation theorists,
critique the sexed and gendered structuring of the value for faithfulness that permeates
the general popular discourse, showing how fidelity employs a metaphor of hetero-
sexual love and marriage to maintain gendered language and hierarchies. Then, in

*English, School of Humanities, University of Southampton. E-mail: s.cobb@soton.ac.uk

© The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press.

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 Adaptation and Gendered Discourses  29

‘Feminine Reading and Genres’ and ‘Masculine Theories and Metaphors’, I focus my
critique on the more recent influential work of Robert Stam, with reference to Brian
McFarlane and Thomas Leitch, to show how the masculine/feminine binary can structure

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the scholarly discourses of film adaptation. By not engaging with the cultural politics of
language use, especially as it concerns gender and sexuality, these scholars unavoidably
reproduce some of what they clearly reject. In the conclusion, I offer some thoughts on
alternatives to fidelity and suggest the need for ongoing feminist interventions into
adaptation studies.
In his article ‘Between the Cat and the Devil: Adaptation Studies and Translation
Studies’, John Milton suggests that adaptation studies and translation studies have
much to share with each other and that recent work in both parallels each other’s desire
to move beyond the terms of fidelity.1 I would like to point out that feminist translation
theory, in particular, has led the way by critiquing the gendered nature of the language
of fidelity. For example, in her article ‘Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation’,
Lori Chamberlain contends that
[t]he metaphorics of translation [the language of fidelity] . . . is a symptom of larger issues of
western culture: of the power relations as they divide in terms of gender; of a persistent (though
not always hegemonic) desire to equate language or language use with morality; of a quest for
originality or unity, and a consequent intolerance of duplicity, of what cannot be decided. (66)

Chamberlain argues that the value for fidelity in translation studies and criticism
attempts to resolve ‘what cannot be decided’. Similarly, in her article ‘Adaptation as
Undecidable: Fidelity and Binarity from Bluestone to Derrida’, Rochelle Hurst makes
her case against fidelity criticism by arguing that adaptation is ‘an undecidable . . . situ-
ated somewhere between the categories of novel and film, simultaneously recognized as
both and as neither . . . thereby refuting the hierarchy that situates the novel as innately
superior to the film, and therefore rendering problematic the desire for fidelity’ (187).
This article endorses a critical respect for what cannot be decided (and advocates the
productive possibilities of such a stance for adaptation studies). Still, as I will demon-
strate below, within adaptation scholarship intolerance for the undecidable remains.

THE GENDERED LANGUAGE OF FIDELITY

Chamberlain argues that faithfulness, as a criterion for translation, is used metaphori-
cally to evoke Western cultural expectations for the gendered relationship of hetero-
sexual marriage and romance. These expectations include received cultural
understandings of the hierarchies between husband and wife, common double standards
regarding chastity within romantic relations, and conventions about the gendered divi-
sion of possessing sexual attractiveness and exercising sexual aggression, as well as the
legal requirements for paternity and legitimacy and the historical and religious require-
ments regarding adultery and divorce.2 In other words, the relatively concrete experience
of the marriage contract, which has traditionally required sexual fidelity and, historically
(and presently in much religious law), could be broken only by a charge of adultery,
shapes the way academics, critics, practitioners, and audiences speak about the abstract
qualities and complexities of the relationship between an adaptation and its adapted text
as ‘both a process and a product of creation and reception’ (Hutcheon, xiv).3
30  SHELLEY COBB

Most commonly, the language of fidelity constructs a gendered possession of

authority and paternity for the source text within adaptation: the film as faithful wife
to the novel as paternal husband. In this way, fidelity legitimises both the relationship

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between the two texts and the act of (re)production:
The concept of fidelity is used to regulate sex and/in the family, to guarantee that the child
is the production of the father, reproduced by the mother. This regulation is a sign of the
father’s authority and power; it is a way of making visible the paternity of the child . . .. As in
marriage, so in translation, there is a legal dimension to the concept of fidelity. It is not legal
(shall I say, legitimate) to publish a translation of works not in the public domain, for example,
without the author’s (or appropriate proxy’s) consent; one must, in short, enter the proper
contract before announcing the birth of the translation, so that the parentage will be clear.
(Chamberlain 66)

Like translations, film adaptations (or motion picture versions) are considered derivative works
by copyright law and they can be made only by the owner of the copyright of the
adapted text or by someone who has been given permission by that owner.4 Ultimately,
the language of fidelity ‘betrays real anxiety about the problem of paternity and
translation; it mimics the patrilineal kinship system where paternity—not maternity—
legitimizes an offspring’ (Chamberlain 58). The legal dimensions of adaptation are
linked to the cultural debates about faithfulness, originality, and authenticity by their
emphasis on legitimacy. Of course, as Chamberlain notes, ‘the infamous “double stan-
dard” operates here as it might have in traditional marriages’ (58). The derivative work
has no hold over the source text, which may spawn multiple versions, and it is only ‘the
“unfaithful” wife/translation [who] is publicly tried for crimes the husband/original is
by law incapable of committing’ (Chamberlain 58). We can no more imagine accusing
a novel of infidelity because it has multiple adaptations than we can imagine accusing
a poem in Greek of being unfaithful because it has been translated into English, German,
and French. The public trial for film adaptations takes place within the public discourse
of newspaper, magazine, television, and new media reviews and in academic articles
and books that inveigh against the film’s adulterous tendencies, using various terms for
being inconstant, disloyal, untrue, false, a cheat, and a betrayal, words that recent schol-
arship insistently and rightly reject. These words can invoke other, more sexualised,
words associated with the destruction of the sanctity of the metaphorical relationship,
such as spoil, profane, defame, and debase. The adapter is accused of abusing,
ravaging, defiling, and molesting the original. In his review of Mansfield Park (Patricia
Rozema 1999), Peter Bradshaw is adamant that ‘Patricia Rozema takes some diabolical
liberties with her perversely experimentalist, and frankly preposterous, reading of Mansfield
Park’ (Bradshaw, emphasis added). In the Women’s Review of Books, Jane Marcus reviews
Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992), saying that she ‘can’t believe anyone who helped with the
making of this mockery of genius has ever read the book . . . or they would not have
dared to desecrate it’ (11, emphasis added). And, Michael Anesko declares that Jane
Campion’s adaptation of The Portrait of a Lady (1996) is ‘inexorably pornographic’ (185).
Sexual violation and lasciviousness are the implied alternative metaphors to fidelity.
In Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation, Brian McFarlane interrogates
this kind of language and suggests the need to move away from ‘words like “tampering”
 Adaptation and Gendered Discourses  31

and “interference” and even “violation”, [because they] give the whole process an air
of deeply sinister molestation’ (12). McFarlane comes close to recognising the metaphor
of sex in fidelity criticism by showing that even apparently banal words like ‘interfer-

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ence’ allude to depictions of ‘molestation’ (12). However, he does not follow through
with his own admonition. McFarlane cautions against the use of the word ‘violation’
but then uses it in another form not long after:
Underlying the process . . . of the more or less faithful film version at least, are those of trans-
ferring the novel’s narrative basis and of adapting those aspects of its enunciation which are
held to be important to retain, but which resist transfer, so as to achieve, through quite dif-
ferent means of signification and reception, affective responses that evoke the viewer’s
memory of the original text without doing violence to it. (21)

McFarlane displaces the object of sanctity from the original text to the viewer’s memory of
it but the word violence functions to uphold the gendered language of fidelity and its
moralising. The circular logic of fidelity causes him to both describe the product of
adaptation and prescribe the process of adaptation. Hurst also critiques McFarlane for
repeating the ‘fidelity fixation’, a result of his insistence on ‘media specificity’ (175). We
should also question whose memory is worth protecting, which viewer is the viewer when
every reader-viewer has his or her own memory, including the adaptation scholar—this
impossible choice is an instance of adaptation’s undecidability. My analysis suggests that,
when it comes to fidelity, the repressed returns, in part at least, because of the language’s
entrenchment in pervasive views, assumptions, traditions, and beliefs about gender and
sex. In a parallel to the critic’s chivalric defence of the novel against the film’s interference
in a review, McFarlane makes a chivalric (if not paternal) defence of the viewer’s memory
from the film’s interference. Moreover, as I have noted above, whose memory is at stake
is unclear, and the return of a displaced fidelity offers protection not only for the abstract
viewer’s memory but also, potentially, a defence of McFarlane’s own personal memory.

FEMININE READING AND GENRES

Many feminist scholars before me have pointed out that gender hierarchies act as struc-
turing principles of key cultural hierarchies. In his influential work, Stam, rightly, in-
cludes feminist theory, as well as multiculturalism, postcolonialism, race, and queer
theory as currents of contemporary criticism that should have more of an impact on
adaptation studies than they have done so far. He recognises that they make a critique
of these cultural and intellectual values because they share, ‘[an] egalitarian thrust, [a]
critique of quietly assumed, unmarked normativities which place whiteness, European-
ness, maleness, and heterosexuality at the center, while marginalizing all that is not
normative’ (3). He argues for the value of using them to analyse individual adaptations,
but he does not explicitly point to the ways that these theories of identity might be used
to critically engage with the discourse of fidelity. Instead, he critiques the language of
fidelity by portraying it as simply a personal subjective response instead of a culturally
constructed one. What I think Stam tries to get at with his concern over the problem of
love in fidelity criticism, but does not say explicitly, is that fidelity allows individual per-
sonal opinion to masquerade as intellectual criticism. This is the potential problem with
McFarlane’s defence of the viewer’s memory.
32  SHELLEY COBB

In the second epigraph to this chapter, Stam argues that the language of fidelity
‘translate[s] our feeling[s]’ for (or, most often, against) the adaptation, feelings that exist
only in relation to our original feelings of love for the book. No matter how one dresses

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up fidelity in concerns about ‘the setting, plot, characters, themes, and the style of the
novel’ or its ‘fundamental narrative, thematic, or aesthetic features’, for Stam, the fact
of adaptation compels the viewer to compare the feeling and emotion the film evokes
to those that the novel evokes.5 The comparison of the affection evoked then compels
one to use the difference between those emotional responses as a judgement of the two
texts’ worthiness of love. In his critique, love, for Stam, functions as the opposite of
criticism: if love is feeling, emotion, and experience, then criticism is detachment,
thought, and theory. Love is subjective, personal, and relational; criticism is analytical,
public, and institutional. Love is partial; criticism is objective. Love is sensation; criti-
cism is intellect. Of the growing chorus of critics who object to fidelity as a critical
standard for adaptations, Stam effects his attack by branding fidelity as not criticism at
all. After suggesting how the various strains of contemporary theory might expose the
blind spots, prejudices, assumptions, and logical fallacies of fidelity, he chooses to dis-
count fidelity as criticism by redefining it as an expression of love and emotion, inti-
mating that no other reason is necessary for it to be labelled suspect as a tool of analysis.
The opposition between love and criticism engenders an ongoing list of binaries:
passion/objectivity, sensation/perception, affect/reason, passive/active, and body/
mind. Each of these, I argue, evokes the feminine/masculine binary. Inasmuch as emo-
tion is gendered feminine against intellect as masculine, Stam’s dismissal of fidelity as a
matter of emotional involvement invokes the image of a reader overwhelmed by feel-
ings so consumed by love for the treasured book so as to be incapable of critical detach-
ment.6 In ‘Mass Culture as Woman’, Andreas Huyssen shows how this image of the
emotional reader is the woman reader, who becomes emblematic of the mass culture
that modernism as a literary movement often positions as its other: ‘woman (Madame
Bovary) is positioned as reader of inferior literature—subjective, emotional, and passive—
while man (Flaubert) emerges as writer of genuine, authentic literature—objective, ironic,
and in control of his aesthetic means’ (46). What is important about Huyssen’s reading
for this article is not so much what woman reads, as configured by this image, but how
she reads (although those two are so intertwined that discursively they become almost
inseparable); she reads subjectively, emotionally, and passively (46). The woman reader
reads for escape, enjoyment, pleasure, and for love, rather than for learning, working,
producing, and for criticism. To return, then, to the second epigraph above, Stam
draws on well-established notions that emotion and feeling are weaknesses when it
comes to criticism. As emotion and feeling are always already the province of women,
he cannot avoid the implication that fidelity, as it translates feeling, is a feminine approach
to adaptation studies and, consequently, has all the attendant characteristics. It is
thoughtless, reactionary, personal, and judgmental criticism guided by indiscriminate
feeling; really, it is no kind of criticism at all. As noted above, Stam uses the pronoun
we and seems to be suggesting that even academics (himself and McFarlane included)
feel compelled to judge adaptations on the basis of fidelity, but he makes it clear that
this impulse, although unavoidable, must be bracketed off as inconsequential, as it has
only a ‘grain of experiential truth’, in order that adaptation studies might ‘move beyond
 Adaptation and Gendered Discourses  33

the moralistic and the judgmental’. Stam’s mistrust of feeling and emotion and the
positioning of them as outside intellectual and critical analysis includes him in what
Rita Felski calls ‘a long-standing tradition of male-authored scholarship that is deeply

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suspicious of the language of emotion, identification, and enjoyment’ (53).
In his article ‘Adaptation, the Genre’, Thomas Leitch also, inadvertently, suggests
that adaptation’s association with the feminine is a problem. Referencing the popularity
and exemplary intertextuality (noted by many critics) of Bridget Jones’s Diary and its rela-
tionship to the 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice he argues:
This retro fantasy of economic, psychological, and cultural plenitude has long been recog-
nized as the defining characteristic of heritage cinema, which might be called a national
utopian romance. When the possibility of seduction by a well-loved novel that both is and is
not present and its cinematic adaptation is added to this heady brew, it becomes the founda-
tion of what many filmgoers would identify as the adaptation genre. (109)7

Leitch’s language is quite striking; like Stam, he describes novels as being loved and his
use of the word seduction demonstrates how adaptation ‘deals of necessity with sexually
charged materials’. Leitch suggests that adaptations of romantic love novels have over-
shadowed the adaptations of romantic adventure, keeping his examples limited to the
novels of Dumas père: The Three Musketeers, The Man in the Iron Mask, and The Count of
Monte Cristo (108). The value of his article is how it shows that some film adaptations
have not been understood as adaptations per se, thereby leaving a hole in the study of
the field. It is fairly clear, though, that the problem he identifies is that the genre of adap-
tation has been dominated, if not defined, by feminine romantic love adaptations rather
than masculine romantic adventure adaptations. Leitch lays out four identifying char-
acteristics of the adaptation genre (period setting, costume drama, fetishising of history,
and intertitles) that are found in both feminine and masculine adaptations, and then he
states clearly why there has been an over association of the genre with the feminine:
These four markers, all essential to adaptations that identify themselves as adaptations, may
be contrasted with a trait long and erroneously assumed to be a genre marker of adaptations
because it is found in most amatory romances, though in hardly any swashbucklers: rever-
ence for the source text. (114)8

Instead of reverence for read fidelity to and we are in the same critical territory that I have
been highlighting in this article: critical discourses regularly describe the problems and
difficulties of adaptation studies in terms of femininity. If the feminine adaptation is
most often the faithful adaptation, it is no surprise then that Leitch’s solution to the
problem of adaptation as a genre is to foreground the masculine romantic adventure
adaptation. I agree with Leitch that many of the films that do not fit the assumed ex-
pectations of what an adaptation looks like need to be re-evaluated, but it is not
necessary to engage in this kind of gendering of the genre to make the case.9

MASCULINE THEORIES AND METAPHORS

Let me pause here to make it clear that I am not going to argue for the value of a femi-
nine approach to adaptations. Both Leitch and Stam critique myriad biases, prejudices,
and intellectual dead ends perpetuated by fidelity criticism, critiques with which I am
34  SHELLEY COBB

in agreement.10 What I am arguing is that they both miss the gendered nature of their
critiques and solutions. For Stam, this causes him to repeat demands of fidelity that he
rejects. As an alternative to the emotional, subjective, and feminine model of fidelity, he

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offers the very structural, objective, and, I am going to suggest, masculine model of nar-
ratology. Part of the reason that prejudices associated with fidelity criticism keep reap-
pearing in adaptation studies is because, as Stam succinctly states, ‘Fidelity theory does
not always name itself as such’ (18). It often functions covertly through what Stam calls
equivalency theory:
[which is] the idea that the filmmaker [should] find the ‘equivalents’ in a new medium for the
novelist’s style or techniques. But, in fact there can be no real equivalence between source
novel and adaptation. While a film can recapitulate the outlines of the basic story .  .  .
the actual resulting texts in their densely signifying materiality will be in many ways incom-
mensurable. (18)

In its more positive forms, equivalency theory promotes the analogous possibilities
between the novel and film. However, because equivalency theory looks for the adap-
tation to find cinematic equivalents of the novel’s various literary qualities, it inevitably
privileges the novel, finding that film does not have adequate equivalent properties or
qualities compared to the written word. Attempting to move beyond fidelity, and equiv-
alency theory, Stam offers an alternative ‘practical/analytical model’ (emphasis in the
original), which he argues can help us answer ‘many of the questions about adaptation
[that] have to do with the modifications and permutations of the story. Here we enter
into the realm of narratology’ (32). Stam takes his model of narratology from Gerard
Genette, specifically Genette’s Palimpsestes (1982), but recognises that, ‘since it involves
two semiotically distinct texts relaying the same narrative . . .. The issue becomes
one of comparative narratology (emphasis in the original)’ (34). The version of
narratology that Stam uses is very formal and structuralist, using dense terminology,
creating categories that break narrative down into its constituent parts, and it privileges
the text as a structure without context and requires a scientific-like objectivity in order
to taxonomise narrative features in full. Narratology, for Stam, is the very opposite of
the noncritical and ‘touchy-feely’ fidelity. It is, for him, analytical and objective, having
all the masculine qualities necessary to counter the feminine weaknesses of fidelity. The
following are some of the questions Stam says a comparative narratology should pursue:
There is also the question of stylistic equivalences across the two media. Which features are
‘translatable’ and which are not? What is the filmic equivalent of an ‘adjective’ or ‘qualifier?’
Lighting and music and angle, for example, could be seen as ‘adjectivally’ placing characters
‘in a certain light’, or seeing them from ‘a certain angle’. Does a wide-angle or fish-eye lens
on a face form the equivalent of the adjective ‘grotesque?’ . . .. What is needed, and what I
have only begun to gesture toward here, is a thoroughgoing comparative stylistics of the
two media. (40–41)

Within this thoughtful paragraph remains the search for equivalences. Stam points to
‘stylistic equivalences’ and asks ‘which features are “translatable” and which are not?’
Despite his rejection of equivalency theory, Stam’s textual analysis continues to look for
what he says does not exist: ‘But what might be the ideal cinematic means for evoking
 Adaptation and Gendered Discourses  35

the ennui that permeates a novel like Madame Bovary?’ (33). By looking for an ideal evocation,
Stam returns to a value for fidelity, showing a clear intolerance for the undecidable.
Although he proffers narratology as on the side of intellect in opposition to fidelity’s

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love, without deconstructing the gendered language and gendered hierarchies of
fidelity, fidelity remains a spectral structuring principle because it has been displaced on
a surface level only.
In concluding his introduction, Stam suggests that we need ‘a new set of tropes for
speaking about adaptation’ (24). He offers as possible options ‘the “Pygmalion” model,
where the adaptation brings the novel to “life”’ or the ‘“ventriloquial” model, where the
film “lends voice” to the mute characters of the novel’ or the ‘“alchemical” model,
where the adaptation turns verbal dross into filmic gold’. He even suggests a couple of
religious models including ‘“the incarnational” model’ where ‘the “Word” of the novel
is “made Flesh”’(24). Despite his gesture of recognition for the value of postmodernist
and poststructuralist theories to deconstruct fidelity, Stam remains a structuralist in his
approach to adaptations, evinced by his propounding of narratology and the meta-
narrative cast to his proposed metaphors. Stam rejects fidelity criticism partly for the
ways he characterises it as a feminine mode, but without recognising the gendered
nature of his rejection, he replaces the feminine gendered model with another more
masculine (and apparently more intellectual) one, even though it does not stop him
from reiterating the values of fidelity. His suggestion of the Pygmalion model, as a trope
for adaptation, is a prime example of this return of the repressed. The tale of the artist
who scorns all other women but the one whom he creates has been critiqued by femi-
nism countless times before. As a new trope for speaking about adaptations, the image
of the male artist who sees only his own version of woman as worthy of love is hardly
a revolution against fidelity.

CONCLUSION: FEMINISM AND ADAPTATION CRITICISM

The problem of fidelity, as Hurst suggests, is that it tries to solve the problem of the in-
herent duplicity of adaptations. This is why it depends on a language of hierarchies and
marshals metaphors of cultural value and identity. Identity and identification require
the simultaneous recognition of sameness (human) and difference (male/female,
black/white, heterosexual/homosexual), and resolving this uncanny experience requires
an ordering and ranking of that difference. Gendered, raced, and classed binaries that
shape Western cultural values express our collective need to rank, order, and prioritise,
in order to resolve the doublings that appear in everything from our minute daily expe-
riences to our grand cultural products. The prevalence of gendered binaries and the
way they can order the language and values of other cultural entities that appear unre-
lated to questions of gender, such as adaptations and fidelity criticism, generate a need
for careful scrutiny of any proposed linguistic alternatives. In my research on women
filmmakers and adaptations, as an alternative to fidelity, I use a metaphor of conversa-
tion that evokes feminist critical traditions of reception studies and is modelled on a
Bakhtinian approach that foregrounds the intertextuality and dialogism of adaptations
(Stam, of course, has taken the lead in advocating intertextuality and dialogism for ad-
aptation studies [see ‘The Dialogics of Adaptation’]). However, I hesitate to present
conversation as the answer to Stam’s call for ‘a new language . . . and a new set of tropes
36  SHELLEY COBB

for speaking about adaptations’ (24) because, for me (as it is for others like Hurst), the
exciting, if sometimes anxiety-producing, element of adaptations is that an adaptation is
an undecidable. As soon as we try to fit it into a critical model, metaphor or binary, it

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deconstructs those limits by virtue of its existence as both an original and a copy, while
simultaneously being neither. I have found that a metaphor of conversation is produc-
tive for analysing adaptations by women filmmakers, but it is possible that in another
context the metaphor might reinstate the hierarchies I have been intent on critiquing. In
the end, feminist interventions into adaptation studies need to be alert to the biased
gendered, sexed, raced, and classed languages, however and wherever they are perpet-
uated, reproducing the unacknowledged cultural hierarchies and prejudices that affect
the way that we perceive, consume, judge, and analyse cultural products.

NOTES
1
 Linda Hutcheon considers adaptation in terms of recent translation theory that views translation as ‘an
act of both inter-cultural and inter-temporal communication’ (16).
2
 I would also suggest that the language of fidelity is not exclusively gendered insomuch as gender can be
understood as discrete from other power relations such as colonialism; as a metaphor, fidelity also evokes
the image of a loyal, but ultimately indebted, servant. It recalls the ideal of the suitable helpmeet whose
role as companion hides the truth of her or his indentured status, requiring the knowledge of the power
structures and abuses that govern the relationships between owner and slave, master and servant, teacher
and disciple, leader and follower, and employer and employee while simultaneously effecting the repression
of that knowledge.
3
 For more on how metaphors shape not just the way we speak about the world but also the way we expect
the world to be, see Lakoff and Johnson.
4
 For the definition of derivative work see US Code 17 § 101, which can be found at http://www.law.cornell
.edu/uscode/html/uscode17/usc_sec_17_00000101----000-.html
5
 Fidelity, of course, assumes that the viewer has read the novel. Stam’s argument seems to suggest that it
also assumes that the viewer/reader enjoyed the book and considers it a good one, when it would be possible
to expect fidelity of an adaptation to a novel that one did not necessarily like or did not think had any
quality.
6
 For more on cultural images of the woman reader, see Kate Flint’s The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 and
Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1984).
7
 See Monk for more on heritage cinema as women’s cinema.
8
 I have disagreements with Leitch’s criteria but it is not necessary to iterate them for this article’s argu-
ment. I would also argue that he overstates the link between fidelity and the amatory adaptation. My forth-
coming monograph on adaptations made by women filmmakers of women’s novels suggests that these
feminine adaptations are often purposefully and self-consciously unfaithful to their source texts (and recognised
as such). Bridget Jones’s Diary is a case in point; see Cobb ‘Adaptable Bridget’.
9
 As noted above, I would argue also that Leitch’s four markers of the adaptation genre are highly debatable.
10
 See Leitch’s Film Adaptation and Its Discontents.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to Neil Ewen and the reviewers for their helpful criticism and advice on
the revising of this article.