A place for West Side Story (1961): Gender, race, and tragedy in Hollywood's adaptation

In 1961, three years after West Side Story premiered on Broadway, Hollywood created a highly successful film version. Although directors Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins strove to remain faithful to the original production in many ways, the change in medium necessitated a number of alterations, including those that conformed to the particular conventions of the Hollywood studio system. In this paper, I explore the film West Side Story as an adaptation in order to demonstrate how Hollywood’s conventions impact the show. The effects of the Production Code, the star system, and the practice of dubbing the actors all had a significant impact on the film. More than that, alterations made to Leonard Bernstein’s music coupled with cinematic techniques modify the musical’s dramatic arc while simultaneously affecting both the gendered and ethnic representations within the show. My approach within this paper takes into account how the music, lyrics, dialogue, and cinematography all work together to form a creative adaptation of West Side Story. Therefore, I combine cinematic and musical analysis in ways that have yet to be applied to this film. I take this approach in order to better understand how West Side Story reflects and even challenges the conventions and stereotypes present during the Hollywood studio era. Furthermore, this provides insight into the ways in which West Side Story fits into film history, particularly that of the movie musical.

A "Greater Britain": colonial kin in fictions of settlement, 1850-1890

This dissertation traces the ways in which nineteenth-century fictional narratives of white settlement represent “family” as, on the one hand, an abstract theoretical model for a unified and relatively homogenous British settler empire and on the other, a fundamental challenge to ideas about imperial integrity and transnational Anglo-Saxon racial identification. I argue that representations of transoceanic white families in nineteenth-century fictions about Australian settler colonialism negotiate the tension between the bounded domesticity of an insular English nation and the kind of kinship that spans oceans and continents as a result of mass emigration from the British isles to the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and the Australian colonies. As such, these fictions construct productive analogies between the familial metaphors and affective language in the political discourse of “Greater Britain”—-a transoceanic imagined community of British settler colonies and their “mother country” united by race and language—-and ideas of family, gender, and domesticity as they operate within specific bourgeois families. Concerns over the disruption of transoceanic families bear testament to contradictions between the idea of a unified imperial identity (both British and Anglo-Saxon), the proliferation of fractured local identities (such as settlers’ English, Irish Catholic, and Australian nationalisms), and the conspicuous absence of indigenous families from narratives of settlement. I intervene at the intersection of postcolonial literary criticism and gender theory by examining the strategic deployments of heteronormative kinship metaphors and metonymies in the rhetorical consolidation of settler colonial space. Settler colonialism was distinct from the “civilizing” domination of subject peoples in South Asia in that it depended on the rhetorical construction of colonial territory as empty space or as land occupied by nearly extinct “primitive” races. This dissertation argues that political rhetoric, travel narratives, and fiction used the image of white female bourgeois reproductive power and sentimental attachment as a technology for settler colonial success, embodying this technology both in the benevolent figure of the metropolitan “mother country” (the paternalistic female counter to the material realities of patriarchal and violent settler colonial practices) and in fictional juxtapositions of happy white settler fecund families with the solitary self-extinguishing figure of the black aboriginal “savage.” Yet even in the narratives where the continuity and coherence of families across imperial space is questioned—-and “Greater Britain” itself—-domesticity and heteronormative familial relations effectively rewrite settler space as white, Anglo-Saxon and bourgeois, and the sentimentalism of troubled European families masks the presence and genocide of indigenous aboriginal peoples. I analyze a range of novels and political texts, canonical and non-canonical, metropolitan and colonial. My introductory first chapter examines the discourse on a “Greater Britain” in the travel narratives of J.A. Froude, Charles Wentworth Dilke, and Anthony Trollope and in the Oxbridge lectures of Herman Merivale and J.R. Seeley. These writers make arguments for an imperial economy of affect circulating between Britain and the settler colonies that reinforces political connections, and at times surpasses the limits of political possibility by relying on the language of sentiment and feeling to build a transoceanic “Greater British” community. Subsequent chapters show how metropolitan and colonial fiction writers, including Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Marcus Clarke, Henry Kingsley, and Catherine Helen Spence, test the viability of this “Greater British” economy of affect by presenting transoceanic family connections and structures straining under the weight of forces including the vast distances between colonies and the “mother country,” settler violence, and the transportation system.