Latent Love or Lust? Liberating Female Sexuality in Joe Wright's 2012 filmic adaptation of Anna Karenina.

I'm looking at the Joe Wright film, Anna Karenina, and I'd like to center around the female protagonists: Anna, Dolly and Kitty. The film does a unique thing with mis-en-scene where the staging and the theatrical all create this sort of spectacle of the story, placing three women alternating between center and behind stage. The costuming, makeup and stage design (mis-en-scene) as well as the score elevate and highlight the treatment, transformation and focus on women. As I examine this film as a literary adaptation visually, verbally and musically, I will also be addressing aspects of the novel that the film captures, and that it does not, in regards to treatment of women. As I analyze both these texts, I will be asking, how are women represented in the novel? How is this representation of women transformed when the novel is adapated to film by Joe Wright? How do changes in the treatment of women across these two texts tell us about changing ideas about and attitudes towards women's sexuality and freedom"? Finally, how does mis-en-scene contribute to the changes in representation of women and their sexuality that the adaptation enables? How does the score contribute as well? My paper will be examining these aspects, answering these questions, and both the film and the novel will constantly be in conversation. I will also be bringing in feminist film criticism, and Tolstoy criticism as frameworks behind my argument, as well as featurettes, interviews, and film reviews of Anna Karenina, to keep the conversation contemporary."