The joy of censorship: strategies of circumvention in novel and film

Unrestricted In this interdisciplinary project, I argue that we can better understand the implicit, unofficial modes of regulation that governed the Victorian novel by studying them in conjunction with the excessively explicit, overwritten regulatory procedures of another narrative genre that is often critiqued for its seeming acquiescence to the dictates of censorship: Hays Code-era Hollywood film. These dictates were primarily moral in nature, intended to prevent the highly popular art forms of the novel and the cinema from corrupting the "susceptible" minds of their lower-class--and female--audiences. They were also, importantly, extra-legal: Hollywood filmmakers chose to embrace the directives of the Code in order to forestall legal battles at the state and Supreme Court levels, while Victorian novelists chose to censor themselves in order to appease the "Mrs. Grundy" element of their book-buying public and avoid legal confrontations altogether. Both types of narrative artists were, then, affected not by the political censorship of tyrannical governments, but by the more insidious censorship of public opinion, of middle-class morality, of the marketplace. And, in response, both sets of artists employed similar strategies of censorship resistance: strategies such as subtlety, visuality, ambiguity, and wit. "The Joy of Censorship" is in the unseemly position of defending censorship from some of the central liberal allegations that are traditionally leveled against it by demonstrating that, for all its blustery self-righteousness, censorship can actually be “good” for sex, politics, feminism, and art.; My chapters are arranged thematically, each using two artists (one British novelist, one Hollywood director) to investigate the theme at hand. I consider, for example, the perverse and paradoxical role that scandal plays in the works of W. M. Thackeray and Preston Sturges, sophistication in the works of Jane Austen and George Cukor, excessive purity in the works of Charles Dickens and Frank Capra, and repression in the works of Charlotte Brontë and Elia Kazan. Ultimately, my project reveals that the allusive, subtextual style of storytelling demanded by censorship is, in many ways, precisely the style best suited to telling tales of sexually and socially subversive desire.