Chapter 6
In: Black Neo-Victoriana
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Abstract
This chapter analyses William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth (2016) as a neo-Victorian film adaptation of Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 novella Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District that also performs a cultural re-appropriation of Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth by setting the narrative in Victorian Britain. Drawing on Gayatri Spivak’s postcolonial analysis of Jane Eyre (1847) and expanding on Christine Geraghty’s work on BAME casting policies in recent British film adaptations of classics, the chapter focuses on the film’s portrayal of gender and race relations. It contends that Oldroyd’s film stages a tacit critique of costume drama’s clichéd, but much overlooked, emancipation of the white, middle-class, and implicitly imperialist, woman from strict Victorian mores at the cost of her racially-other counterparts.