Alterations and Adaptations of the Past: Sarah Waters & Michel Faber

Abstract

This thesis reads and analyses Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith (2002) and Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2003) in the light of its portrayals of contemporary anxieties. A specific 21st century anxiety which is discussed is the lack of LGBT+ representation in the past, which leads to confusion within individuals and invalidation through heteronormative society. Another is the unequal treatment of women in a contemporary, nearly classless society, which traces its origins in the class-dependent treatment of women in Victorian society. This thesis relates the notion of ‘queering history’ and unconventional gender roles of the 21st century and how they are imposed onto aforementioned novels. The historical alterations in these novels can be seen as projections of contemporary anxieties onto the past, and these rewritings are used in order to revalidate from the past and cope with the aftermath.