From Madame Bovary to Ryan’s Daughter: Literary, Cultural, and Historical Palimpsests.

This article examines Ryan’s Daughter, Robert Bolt and David Lean’s transformative screen adaptation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), and investigates the film’s treatment of history and its generation of meaning, suggesting that when released in 1970, it was ahead of its time in terms of collaborative, intertextual, and cultural-historical palimpsestuous adaptation. Although intended to be a loose adaptation of Madame Bovary, a relational reading of the screenplay and the film shows palimpsestuous emergence of themes, subthemes, and characters not only from the source text but also from Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd and the uprisings of 1848 in France and 1916 in Ireland. In addition, it is argued that the ghostly presence of Flaubert and Madame Bovary haunted the film and its authors and was a significant factor in the fashioning of a diegetic, transcultural adaptation that, having been largely overlooked and disparaged for over four decades, deserves to be critically reappraised and recognized as a powerful and dynamic adaptation and reinvention of Flaubert’s classic novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]