"The Wives of Bath
by Susan Swan
A new prologue
about the process of the novel becoming a film.
Writers often dream of their novel being made into a successful film. But
a (a sad, little sinking feeling) overcame me the moment I heard the screenwriter
wanted to set the film version of The Wives of Bath in the present. This would
mean jettisoning the time period of my novel about a murder at a girls' boarding
school. Its tale of a friendship triangle between three girls reflects some
aspects of my own experience, as a boarder at Havergal College in Toronto
in the early 1960s, so this period was nostalgic for me. It was a transition
era before the protest generation - dominated by President Kennedy and the
Peace Corps, lingering sexual taboos and rigid definitions of what it meant
to be male and female. The ideas associated with this period were central
to the novel. Hence my sense of loss. Could I bear to let someone else change
my story? But the screenwriter, Judith Thompson, one of Canada's best-known
playwrights,
thought these ideas could carry over into the present. She didn't grow up in the 1960s and preferred to use a contemporary idiom. My background in the theatre meant I already knew that adaptations of novels were not adaptations at all but translations, and with a very few exceptions, most theatre performances and films will suffer if the director tries to duplicate the book. Likely all of us have gone through the experience of going to the film of a well-loved book and coming away disappointed. Surprisingly, these films are often the result of a director trying to stay slavishly true to the novelist's vision. Directors risk turning a novel into a lifeless film unless they are free to create their own interpretation of a book. I'd learned this in the 1970s collaborating on theatre pieces with Toronto choreographers. Time after time, I was told my word-based notions wouldn't read on the stage. Time after time, the choreographers were right, and I learned to trust those with theatre experience.
Using language skillfully is not only the novelist's most (powerful tool,
it's the central tool) and the matrix of the story. Novelists have to create
the effects, including making a character, through dialogue and descriptive
passages. Plays depend, in part, on verbal play for their dramatic impact
while films are not a linguistic medium at all. Dialogue aside, language in
screenplays is used to point to the right kind of imagery. This is humbling,
but essential for a novelist to understand! So I uttered a bittersweet sigh
and gave Judith the go-ahead with the modern setting. Later, reading Judith's
original screenplay, I was delighted by her interpretation of the boarding
school triangle although superficially her script looked vastly different
from my novel. For one thing, Judith's characters now spoke modern slang.
And there were other changes. One of the girls cultist worship of King Kong
as a symbol of masculine power had been exchanged for the love of a falcon,
kept secretly on the school grounds; the boarding school of Bath Ladies College
was now liberal; and Mouse, the narrator, had lost the hump that might have
made her look a little grotesque on the big screen.
Still, I was pleased to see how closely Judith kept to the emotional ground
of the story and to its three characters. Intact were Paulie Sykes, the boarding
school rebel who wants to pass as a boy; the kind and beautiful Tory Quinn,
who struggles with Paulie's idealizing love; and Mouse Bradford, the timid
new boarder. She'd made Paulie, Tory and Mouse come alive through
believable screen dialogue and skillful interpretations of the emotionally
important scenes in the novel.
For instance,
in the novel, Mouse has a dream in which she is unable to help her dead mother
when one of the vengeful boarding school matrons shears off their mother's
golden (hair) in a tower room and pours oil on her mother's frilled blouse.
In the screenplay, the three girls read, out loud to one another, letters
they they've written to their mothers. Tory confesses she's
addicted to her mother's love as she is to chocolate; Mouse worries that she
can't remember her mother's face now that she's dead; and Paulie asks her
mother, a teen prostitute who gave her up for adoption to meet her for a
beer on the same street where, Paulie writes, "you sell your ass."
This is a funny and profound scene because the audience sees not only Mouse's
vulnerability but the vulnerability of the other two and the way all their
fates are inextricably affected by their mother's personalities and expectations.
A mother is, for better or worse, a girl's first role model. And for me, the
core of the novel revolves around the struggle of the three girls to come
to terms with what they feel is an unheroic identity, namely, growing up female.
In the novel, Mouse is confused by the two female choices in the early 1960s.
On the one hand, Mouse sees the mothers of the boarders who meet feminine
standards of the day, but lack real power or authority. On the other, she
encounters the teachers and matrons of the boarding school who remind her
of Chaucer's Wife of Bath because they are the only women she has met who
live by their own rules. Yet even their power is limited, and Mouse concludes
near the end of the novel: "We were all Wives of Bath from the teachers
who terrorized us with their bells and gatings.But no matter how hard any
of us struggled. Bath Ladies College was only a fiefdom in the kingdom of
men."
In Judith's script, set in the 1990s, the teachers and matrons are kinder
and less marginalized than their counterparts in the novel. They actually
seem to like the girls and identify with them, although they are just as helpless
as older women were in the novel to prevent Paulie's self-destructive and
violent descent. In the early days of the filmmaking, Judith and I on occasion
read our version of the same scene from the novel and screenplay at literary
festivals. Inevitably, I was struck by how little she needed to say to evoke
a character. For instance, once after I read the novel's opening pages (in
which Mouse explains to the reader who she is and then sets up Paulie's crime
as "a bizarre, Napoleonic act of self-assertion"), Judith brought
down the house theatrically speaking with her terser version in Paulie's
voice, "I killed him for his dick."
The film of The Wives of Bath changed both directors and production companies
twice before the option to make the film was given to the award-winning independent
director Lea Pool and Montreal producers Cite-Amerique, who premiered the
film to great acclaim at the Sundance Film Festival and Berlin Film Festival
in 2001. Half a decade after I agreed to a present-day setting, I was lucky
enough to see Lea Pool's film Emporte-moi. When Cite-Amerique came in with
an offer that included matching the talent of Lea Pool with Judith Thompson's
original screenplay, I accepted readily.
If Judith understood how to make the passion of teenage girls live in scenes
and dialogue, Pool, in her turn, appreciated the Sapphic quality of their
teenage love. However, as Pool (told) and audience member at Sundance, she
never saw the novel or her film as a lesbian coming-out story. For her, it
is a story of adolescent love at a time in girls' lives when they are unaware
of sophisticated political and sexual preferences. This was very much how
I saw the story too.
The representation
of adult sexuality in Lost and Delirious, as the film was eventually called,
is openly celebratory, unlike the alienated sex scenes ion the novel which
reflect the repressions of the early 1960s when boarders were so embarrassed
by their bodies that they undressed in washroom cubicles or took their uniforms
off under their nightgowns. Consider the scene in the
novel when Mouse spies on a fellow boarder, Ismay Thom, struggling into her
merry widow. "She appeared to be stuck in the tight, elasticized material,
which squeezed her blubbery thighs together like breasts. A gross kind of
leg cleavage you could say." The sexuality on the novel has little n
common with the stunning sex-positive scenes that had film critic Roger Ebert
remarking on a Chicago Sun-Times review (January 2001) that, "You're
absorbed from beginning to end because the character are enormously interesting
and likable. And because they are gorgeous. And because you could hear a pin
drop in the 1,400-seat Eccles Center during the sex scenes
which are not explicit, but are erotic." Despite the beautiful sex scenes
in Pool's film, the actors nevertheless express the girls' frustration with
their female roles, and their need to make what is perceived as unheroic,
heroic. In the film, the girls discuss Lady Macbeth in a class (a scene that
is not in the novel) in a way that underscores, comically and movingly, how
young women can see femininity as something weak and passive.
I was inspired to base the conclusion of The Wives of Bath on a heinous crime
that took place in Toronto in 1978. A seventeen-year-old girl, who regularly
passed herself off as a male gas jockey, murdered an elderly Toronto taxi
driver. Dressed as a girl, she lured him to her room on the pretext that she
needed his help with some luggage. Then she killed him with a baseball bat,
cut off his genitals and pasted them on her body with Krazy Glue. In this
woeful garb, she resented herself to her girlfriend's father, who had accused
her of not being a real man.
Although you will not see this real crime portrayed in Pool's brilliant film, you will see something equally surprising and stirring in its place. When I found out late in the production of the film that Pool had left out the novel's ending, I suspected the producers of watering down the story for commercial reasons. As the credits came up, and my film agent Tina Horwitz, and I staggered happily from our seats, I realized that I was relieved that Pool had chosen another ending. The crime in the novel was a device to reflect on the character's thoughts and feelings about themselves as girls, but (Lea) Pool's camera didn't need the crime to convey these same things. To stick with my ending might have tipped her powerful drama over into the genre of film horror because cinematic effects are so much more visceral and immediate than words on a page. To portray something so horrific in the film might have interfered with the audience's ability to stay with the story.
It's rare for novelist to be shamelessly satisfied with their book's journey
into film. However, I feel as if my story about boarding school girls has
passed through the imaginations of three women sitting around a campfire,
each one adding their unique knowledge to my tale of female rebellion and
adolescent love. Writers and readers should never hold it against a film if
the film isn't exactly like the book it was based on. The question is is
it a good movie? That, in the end, is the film's truest service to a work
of literature.
Susan
Swan
New York, 2001"