La apropiación postestimonial del trauma: Stonehearst Asylum (2014) como reanimación transmedial neovictoriana de un cuento de Edgar Allan Poe

Abstract

This paper analyzes the film Stonehearst Asylum (2014) directed by Brad Anderson (with screenplay by Joseph Gangemi) as a transmedia reanimation of Edgar Allan Poe’s tale “The system of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether” (1845). The theoretical framework for this analysis has been constructed on the basis of Linda Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation (2006), reflections by various authors on the issue of fidelity collected by Welsh and Lev (2007), and the model of analytical approaches devised by Snyder (2011). The analysis centers around the reformulations that the film proposes to resolve the adaptation difficulties inherent in the source text by means of certain permutations operated by the adapting text. The main adaptation issues lie in the short story’s main narrative strategy with its concomitant dramatic irony, the brevity of the uneventful tale itself, and the hypotext’s signifying polyvalence, which results from the fact that the tale can be read synchronously as a black humor tale, a satire against abolitionism, and an indictment of democracy, among other subtexts. With a theoretical framework also relying on Gutleben and Kohlke’s reflections on the role of bearing after-witness to human suffering (2010), the paper delves into the transformations that facilitate the construction of the film as a neo-Victorian text which censures institutions from the past –and, spectrally, from the present –from a culture of empathy towards psychological trauma. The paper also considers the ethical objections emerging from the graphic representation of the traumatized subject, or, in other words, the poethics of representation.