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Thackeray, Sturges, and the Scandal of Censorship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Nora Gilbert
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Extract

In the wake of Foucault's influential retelling of the history of sexuality, a new school of censorship theory emerged that was devoted to exposing and unpacking the paradoxically productive effects of censorious practices. This essay traces a particular strand of that paradox, labeled here the logic of scandal: the logic wherein discourse is authorized and amplified by feelings like shock and moral condemnation rather than stymied by them. To explore the ramifications of this logic for and within narrative art, I take as my subjects a novel written during the famously prudish Victorian era and a film produced under the famously stringent Production Code—W. M. Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve. In each the “scandalous” discursive acrobatics performed by the text's morally ambiguous heroine reflect the strategies of censorship evasion employed by the morally ambiguous artist who created her.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 127 , Issue 3 , May 2012 , pp. 542 - 557
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by The Modern Language Association of America

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