Welcome friend! It is my pleasure today to host author Elizabeth Gilliland! We have collaborated together a few times in the past. I interviewed her after reading What Happened on Box Hill, a Jane Austen retelling where the characters from different books are all together in one. She is the co-founder of Bayou Wolf Press and in another Creator’s Roulette post, we learned about the experience of starting a press. Today, she is sharing about literary genealogy, how retellings can mean many things. With a PhD and a dissertation on Jane Austen adaptations, Elizabeth is a knowledgeable person to learn from. 🙂
Literary Genealogy
Guest post by Elizabeth Gilliland
Thank you so much for having me again, Kriti! I read (and loved) Kate Sheeran’s great post on Creator’s Roulette – On Retelling a Classic – and I would like to start off with saying a giant ditto, to pretty much everything. She summed up so well what makes a classic, why the classics get retold, and the many exciting variations that are possible as a result. (I definitely found a few new books to add to my TBR pile after reading her article!)
Today I’d like to continue that conversation started by Kate and talk about inspiration vs adaptation, and how we can accurately trace the common traits between texts.
People have so many different expectations when they encounter a text that’s based off another book. With films that are adaptations of books, there generally seems to be a stronger expectation that you will be getting something close to the experience of the original, especially if it’s an adaptation of a recent novel/play/video game/etc.
With retellings of classic literature, there seems to be a better understanding that changes to the original will need to be made; a re-telling implies that you will be telling the story in a different way. There will still be readers who expect certain things, and some who get mad that you interpret things differently than they do, but the expectation for fidelity is less intense overall.
Even knowing this, there is a lot of room for interpretation when it comes to re-envisioning a classic story. Sometimes this can create an exciting experience for the reader–and sometimes it leads to frustration, anger, and throwing of books against the wall.
I wish that we had a more comprehensive vocabulary for the possibilities within retellings–a word, say, for retellings that keep the same basic plot/characters but change only one major element of the setting (like putting the book in the future, or in an underwater kingdom), and another word for retellings that focus on casting the characters in a new light, and maybe another word altogether for retellings that change the tone or the focus of the text. That might spare the reader, and the writer, a lot of heartache and confusion due to unmet expectations.
Until that day comes, I think all you can do as a writer is to make it as clear to yourself as possible what kind of story you want to tell, and determine from there how close you want to stay to the original material.
This determination will differ from project to project, of course. In the Austen University Mysteries series, I follow the plot points of Jane Austen’s novels fairly closely, but bring them into modern day, throw in some crime, and overlap the storylines and characters from all of Austen’s novels. In some ways, the end result is very close to the original novels, and in other ways it might be unrecognizable.
In my upcoming novel, Come One, Come All, I am VERY loosely drawing from elements of Wuthering Heights. The characters are different, the plot goes in a fairly radically different direction, and the setting is a modern-day traveling circus in America instead of the Yorkshire moors. The overall Gothic tone of the book and certain themes are very much inspired by Wuthering Heights, though, and I’ve tried to throw in some references for eagle-eyed readers that call back to Emily Bronte.
Because it is so vastly different from Wuthering Heights, I definitely wouldn’t classify Come One, Come All as a retelling, and I would hesitate to even call it anything under the broader umbrella of adaptation. Julie Saunders writes in her fantastic book, Adaptations and Appropriations, about a third alternative, called an appropriation. Appropriations are texts that loosely borrow from another source text, maybe picking and choosing some plot points and/or characters, but changing so much else that the overall shape of the story stands on its own.
The examples I always like to use to differentiate between the three would be that the 2005 Keira Knightley Pride & Prejudice is an adaptation of Austen’s novel because it moves the same basic plot, story, and characters into a new medium; Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a retelling because it retains many core elements from the original story but introduces a new element (zombies) that casts the original in a new light; and Bridget Jones’s Diary is an appropriation because it pulls a few key elements from Austen’s novel but only loosely follows the plot and structure.
These are all helpful differentiations, but I feel like at least one more category is needed, for the relationship between a new text that is heavily influenced by another text. As a writer, you want to pay tribute to the text that gave you so many ideas and was the source of such inspiration, but you don’t want to be accused of copying; yet, if the new text isn’t close enough to the original, you risk alienating readers who expect a semi-faithful re-creation of a beloved book.
I’d like to propose the terminology of ancestor/descendent texts to describe a relationship between two texts that isn’t quite adaptation but is close enough to be noted. Like two members of the same family tree, we might notice that these books have quite a bit in common and maybe even share some of the same DNA, but these similarities have also been impacted by outside influences (time, dilution of the genetic traits through the generations, etc.).
Just like you might notice that your nephew Billy has the same nose as great-uncle Charlie did, we wouldn’t expect Billy to be an exact copy of his ancestor; we can honor the similarities while fully appreciating and acknowledging the differences between the two.
Take, for instance, the parallels between the character Jon Snow from Game of Thrones and King Arthur from the legends of the Round Table. Both are raised as bastards though they are actually in line for the throne; both wield powerful swords (Longclaw and Excalibur) and receive aid from sorcerers in their respective quests (Melisandre and Merlin); and both have questionable relationships with close relatives (Morgana/Morgause and Daenerys). No one thinks of Game of Thrones as an adaptation, retelling, or appropriation of the King Arthur legends, but one could easily make the case that the legends of Camelot are ancestor texts for the Song of Ice and Fire series.
Adding this new category makes me feel much more comfortable in exploring the relationship between Come One, Come All and Wuthering Heights. The two definitely aren’t close enough for me to claim my novel is an adaptation, retelling, or even an appropriation of Bronte’s novel; but I would feel much more comfortable saying that Wuthering Heights is like a great-grandmother of Come One, Come All. I would hate for readers to go in with the expectation of getting “Cathy and Heathcliff, but in a circus!”; but the inspiration that I drew from Bronte’s writing cannot be denied, and should definitely be acknowledged.
I hope this will be helpful to other writers who similarly don’t know how to express their relationship to other texts that have come before. Let’s not be afraid to pay tribute to the great writing that has moved and inspired us, but let’s also be careful to use the right terminology to do so.
I learned so much from this post! I hadn’t realized the connection between Game of Thrones and King Arthur.
Tell us your thoughts on this post in the comments.
Thank you for hanging out with us today. Connect with Elizabeth on Goodreads, Twitter and check out her press website for updates.
Cover image: Photo by Marcel Eberle on Unsplash
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