Claire at Culloden (Caitriona Balfe), third season –a 1950s costume seen through demure 2017 eyes
Dear friends and readers,
I am just now listening to Davina Porter read aloud dramatically (with nuance and appropriate tones) an unabridged text of Diana Gabaldon’s Dragonfly in Amber and engaged in rewatching Season 1 of the mini-series (every couple of nights another episode) and Season 3 (on Starz, through Comcast, which while it does not give me access to streaming, plays the weekly episode at least twice daily for some 6 days after a new one airs) and would like to report or record some significant changes from the books to the films, which I cannot find cited anywhere on the Internet or in Gabaldon’s first Outlandish Companion (there have now been two volumes, the first on Outlander, Dragonfly in Amber, Voyager).
The opening episode (prologue in effect) to Season 2 comes from the third novel, Voyager: scenes in a hospital or recuperation place as Claire makes her transition from a bedraggled, filthy, semi-starved reluctant participant in the 18th century Scottish-Jacobite rebellion against the Hanoverian regime in England to a 20th century pregnant wife of a history professor. The opening (not a prologue but part of the matter proper) five episodes of the third season comes from the second book, Dragonfly in Amber: Claire and Brianna’s (Sophie Skelton) trip to Inverness twenty years after Claire left with Frank Randall (Tobias Menzies) for Boston where he became a tenured published respected professor at Harvard and she a physician; they encounter Roger Wakefield, now also (like Frank Randall once was) a history professor at Oxford; there is no interruption of material from what Jamie is doing concurrently in Scotland in the 18th century (as there is in the mini-series which places this material from the later parts of Voyager into an interweave in the first half of the third season).
Claire, Roger Wakefield (Richard Rankin), Brianna Randall reading through records, third season
Dragonfly in Amber then proceeds as the second season did — to France. There is a much longer extended dramatization of Claire’s time as a healer working with Mother Hildegarde (Frances de la Tour) in L’Hopital des Anges, a convent hospital in Paris preceding the catastrophe of the march into England by the Jacobite army under Prince Charles (Andrew Gower) and the Earl of Murray (Julian Wadham), and then its subsequent forced retreat (not enough people joined) to momentary victory at Prestonpans and then disaster at Culloden. And then the second season moves abruptly to American in 1967/68 or so, with Claire’s education as surgeon-physician, and Frank’s death in a car accident just as he is about to leave Claire for Oxford, taking Brianna with him; and the plunge into in medias res Claire and Brianna’s visit to Inverness and discovery that Jamie survived Culloden.
The point is to shift the emphasis: in the second book it’s strongly on Claire, her development of herself as a physician and mother, her return to deeply engaged imagined roots to equal or more time to Jamie. Scots clan politics, and the battlefields. In the third book, Voyager, we are reading a woman’s novel for five long superb chapters – and they are long — as Claire gets up the courage to tell her daughter the truth of her parentage and about Claire’s time in 18th century Scotland both at first in Boston, and then as they travel to deeply felt sites de memoires. The episode in the third season (five, “Freedom and Whiskey”) preceding Claire’s journey back reminded me of older classic women’s films like Now Voyager (starring Bette Davis, based on a Olive Prouty novel) and Stella Dallas (starring Barbara Stanwyck, a King Vidor film about a selfless mother devoting herself to a spoilt daughter who is not at fault as she hasn’t been told) and Letter from an Unknown Woman (starring Joan Fontaine, a Max Ophuls film).
Claire pregnant serving Frank (Tobias Menzies), 3rd season
In the concluding features to the DVD for the second season, Ronald Moore, the real creator of this mini-series in the script, in the direction, in the filming, discusses what is changed from book to film. He keeps his discussion on a high level of generality: they cannot film the book because one sentence saying X was riding to Y can take hundreds of dollars and 20 minutes film time. He does tell of how each episode is a unit in itself with its own self-enclosed themes and structure. He conceded a great deal more dramatization of what Jamie was doing in Paris and the battlefields merely told or remembered in the novel occurs in the mini-series. Nonetheless or at the same time the driving inner force of the books is about Claire and through her women’s worlds and that provides framing (however switched), continuity (in say the voice-over) and many sequences in the book within the male action-adventure episodes, for example, to take from all three seasons thus far: the domestic world of Lallybroch, Claire’s quest to find and rescue Jamie working as a dancing gypsy with Murtagh (Duncan Lacroix) (Season 1), the French saloniere’s libetine culture, Claire helping Jenny (Laura Donnelly) through childbirth, the coercion of Mary Hawkins (Rosie Day) to marry a much older distasteful man, a rape of her in the streets, and her murderous revenge, her pregnancy by Alexander Randall (younger gentle brother to Jonathan Wolverton), most of all the medical science worlds, Claire’s stillborn child. There is a female gaze, mother-and-daughter and women’s friendship-sisterhood caring narrative at work. The proportion is changed significantly in the mini-series so the woman’s novel is obscured.
All this is suppressed, not only the changes, but any discussion at all of differences between films and books on the Outlander sites on face-book and twitter — this is strange as such discussions occur regularly on the Poldark sites (and many others, Austen sites for example). It’s common on fan sites for people watching the films to talk of the differences in the books and some of the inferences they make. Much worse, I notice ads imposed on these Outlander sites (including the one not controlled by the makers of the films) which model female swoons at the male actors. It repeats over and over. This effectively silences any other approach to the candid sexuality of the women (and here the parallels are the swooning posters over Aidan Turner, only they are not so slickly done, though they use popular promotional material made for just this purpose). This is no surprise as every face-book or other site on the Net I have found (with one significant exception) seems to have been set up and is controlled by the film-makers or Gabaldon herself. But it makes for a great loss of understanding.
I do not deny the presence of a counter-force of the patriarchal macho-male culture across the culture in the books: for example, though Claire is having two lovers, two husbands, she is coerced into this, has not two selves but one (for Jamie as the “love of her life”); when serious politics or grim difficulties are to be endured she is told she must go back through the stones (in a scene between Jamie and Claire by the stones oddly reminiscent of the famous Casablanca where Rick teaches Ilsa she must retreat while he stays to endure the risk and serious business, with his deeper companion, the French officer played by Claude Rains – the equivalent figure is Murtagh). No doppelganger here. This is not a stealth woman’s film much like Wolf Hall (Hilary Mantel the source) or The Boleyn Girl (Philippa Gregory) where a not-so-muted protest is made against the treatment of women in the terms of gorgeous costume drama.
Claire mannishly dressed in the 3rd season
As to what commentary my blogs have elicited and I have read in “official recaps” (there is one in the New York Times on-line), I have been startled to discover that the depiction of Claire’s relationship to her daughter, Brianna is seen by all of them as “dysfunctional” and “Claire’s fault.” It seems they “side” with Brianna that the mother lived in “a world of her own” (that is a charge the daughter made) and was somehow inattentive (?) and certainly gave Frank, her husband, a “bad deal.” I can see how her living with Frank can be seen that way: it must be he who paid for her physician’s education; all one can say is he choose this, she did all she could to be a good lover with him but she couldn’t forget the other man. To her daughter too she is all self-sacrifice: with Frank she lives except for the job an utterly 1950s housewife life — no one objects to her job as that’s not socially acceptable any more. To her daughter she is utterly abject; she gives every hour she could — Frank accuses her of “never being there,” reminding me of the implied accusations in The Divine Order: by going to vote, by getting a job our heroine must neglect her function as a mother, and (obedient) wife and sexual lover. And she apologizes to her daughter profusely again and again. To me the portrait was dripping with sentiment. I felt Claire would learn to dislike such a daughter, or just never behave that way. So it was false. In Dragonfly in Amber we see Frank being nasty, resentful, marital bickering; this is removed in the film so he looks put upon and not himself equally supporting against this as is marriage.
Claire had apologized to no one up to the time her daughter grew up and complained. “Self-absorption” is another no-no women face. I suspect I’d be seen as living in a world of my own. How dare you? who do you think you are?
Now I discover that the interpretation of all five of the first episodes of the third season have Claire as villain. I can’t quite see why she is a villain, but so they all assert. Only now in the sixth that she has crossed the stones and become Jamie’s wife in 18th century terms is she heroine again. Her villainy with her daughter and coming son-in-law is strange to me. What is it they resent? Frank has a mistress by this time — who reviles Claire for not “letting Frank go,” and making him have a miserable life when she could have given him great happiness.
The moralizing justification for watching this show meanwhile is its feminism, and the one academic paper I’ve heard emphasized its use of female narrator and over-voice. The speaker also claimed the mini-series satisfies the female gaze — though the NYTimes woman reminds us Claire is continually threatened by rape and there is much male violence, and Jamie takes Claire’s place as victim — I’d add from a sadistic homosexual (however this is denied) perspective thus damning homosexual men. Claire’s POV was dominant in the first season but (once again) Ronald Moore has admitted he has added (the way Davies did for Colin Firth as Darcy) much matching material to make Jamie’s point of view equal and one of the episodes this season was purely him in a fantasy of acceptance in a great country house where he provides the heir and the central woman-mother of this boy conveniently dies. But among these ordinary or common women readers, there are protests against this over-voice — a film studies book I have argues that over-voice is so rarely used because it’s seen as feminine.
As to the first Episodes six through eight of season three (her return, her defense of herself, her resuming her “career” as a physician), we could subtitle the sequence Claire Has Grown Up. A different kind of conflict emerges between Jamie and Claire: she is 20 years older, she is a physician, she is used to controlling her time, place and having a job. After she is (per usual) nearly raped and murdered at the close of episode 6 and opening of 7, she insists on trying to save the man’s life. She is told by Jamie were the body to be discovered no one would believe her story; living in brothel, she’d be at fault; she’d be put in prison or hung. So misogyny made plain. But against his advice she persists. To get the compounds she wants, she has to agree to see another patient — someone buying compounds who she frames as a patient. Going there she discovers they are crooks; the woman mentally deranged and used by her brother to make money — put on laudanum day and night. She can do nothing for her. Come back and she has ideas of moving out of the brothel, get a place of their own you see, from which she could set up her own business as a healer. Or from the printer’s shop. He looks bemused. Then Ian’s son is there and she meets (a moving scene) Ian (Steven Cree), her crippled brother-in-law for the first time in 20 years. She has to account for her absence and lies that she thought Jamie dead and lived in Boston, but lately finding out he was living (Promptly?) returned. Ian does not quite swallow this. Then she sees Jamie lie about Ian’s son and say he doesn’t know where the boy is; in fact he’s at the printing bedding a a very willing girl servant (yes — male wet dreams satisfied here). Claire is appalled: Ian is worried sick, and as a parent Ian should be told. She forgets that Jamie has a son and he begins to speak back about his lack of connection to Brianna and his jealousy of how he felt imagining her relationship with Frank.
She is wanting her own identity, has her own ideas. The new sidekick, Mr Willoughby (Gary Young, an Asian actor) has become her assistant; he refers to her as “honorable wife.” In fact her outfit, which is complained about as so “nurse-like” is right; the film-makers are trying to assert her as a separate identity — probably from the books. Then the thunderbolt in the last minutes of Episode 8 (“First Wife”). The young Ian and a servant girl from a tavern are having sex in the printing shop and come across a spy intent oon exposing Jamie’s seditious activities or smuggling and in the melee the print office is burnt down, with Jamie losing his business — after heroically saving the boy (reminding me of a scene in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton). (What happened to the girl? she doesn’t count?), years of effort and a legitimate profession gone. Now what?; what turn of history have they now? turning to pirates is admitting a lack of suitable organic material, a poverty of invention …
A promotional shot
That films are a key force in our cultural worlds is onereason I study and write about them.
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
I’m enjoying both the books, the audio books and the mini series. There will always be differences between books and the film versions and not just in Outlander. We have seen this in Poldark and many others. I suppose there’s a tendency to interpret the written word into a film that will appeal to mass audiences. Unfortunately this often leads to many changes and deviations from the original story line and content.
Rosalynde Lemarchand
It’s worth putting out into the public those changes which alter a woman-centered book to further reinforce (ironically) hostilty to women because there is an implied pretense otherwise. It’s not as if these are neutral changes. And the books themselves are homophobic (sometimes in the extreme), with violence presented as a solution to problems. Gabaldon’s point of view is not the liberal humane and reasoning one of the Poldark books in the first place. It’s also very worth while to bring out the positive perspective on women through Claire which I see nowhere discussed in the various on-line discussion sites, not even the recaps where the concentration is on sheer techniques so what’s evaluated is dramatic trivia. If the changes were in a positive or progressive direction, I would be glad of them. I hope I am writing similarly on my Poldark blogs. These are all women’s films, art (“all art is propaganda” said Orwell) which has an innate appeal to women, coming out of texts that are primarily women’s genres.
To the reply on one of these controlled face-book sites that the “audiobooks” of Gabaldon’s novels “are awesome,” i wrote:
Davina Porter is a superb reader.; she also reads books by Virginia Woolf, A.S. Byatt and I have her reading an unabridged recent translation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karerina.
Amelia Ann Rose: “Why a mini-series? Those are limited to a portion of a year, not multiple seasons. This writer seems British so maybe it’s that. Young Ian told the willing servant girl to go the other way & run.
Me: I don’t understand your question. Among other things, in her Outlandish Companion, Gabaldon said she thought her books too long, too rich and with two complicated a plot for a single movie. It’s rare nowadays for a TV series to run across a year. As to her nationality, it’s easy to find out on wikipedia or he Outlandish Companion: she’s American and has a Ph.D. in one of the sciences.
Oh and the young girl: and this way she is dismissed from the stage. How she felt about sex unimportant.
Amelia Amy Rose Let me clarify. I was asking why you Ellen refer to this TV series as a “mini-series.” It is clearly a series because it has several seasons, nothing “mini” about it. I’ve heard that in Britain, people refer to “seasons” as “series,” so I was speculating that you Ellen may be British. I am aware that Diana is an American in Arizona. Also you asked what happened to the girl so I answered that. Thanks for explaining you felt there should be some follow up about her.
Me: Oh I see. I didn’t mean any disrespect. Mini-series is a term I’ve come across in film-studies; it describes any series of episodes which is less than a year; 16 episodes in the first year is a lot,yes, but the next year they could if they want have say 8. Downton Abbey had different numbers. The point is probably they can be cancelled from year to year if they don’t get the ratings. Perhaps serial drama would be the more appropriate for Outlander since it’s a series of books; mini-series would be more appropriate for a single novel (say The Tenant of Wildfell Hall). What’s been happening since the advent of these high-tiered channels, ways of watching online (internet), Netflix and Amazo is these mini-series are getting longer. For a while they were 6 episodes and the norm is becoming again 10 or 13. So Handmaid’s Tale which was 10 episodes (I think, on Hulu) should be over as the book is all used up, but Atwood has sold the rights and now if the film-makers want they can invent a whole second story. I don’t know; in the case of the Poldark, Winston Graham put into the contract no new stories would be made of his characters unless he wrote a book first.
No I was born in Manhattan, grew up in the Bronx, lived the first half of my life in NYC, and now in Virginia. But I did go to a British university for a year, married an Englishman, lived in England (the north, Yorkshire, the West Riding) for 3 years and have visited very often since. Outlander, the book, and now this series is unlike many movies in it has heroines who talk to each other about more things than men, sex, marriage and children; the famous “classic” movies center on men and by men (say Casablanca, Citizen Kane); so I’m alert to and mention when female characters are subordinate to some plot-design which features the boy’s story.
I apologize if I was brusque; if I didn’t think well of this serial drama, I wouldn’t write about it nor read the books ….
Yet more from Amelia Rose:
No problem. But I disagree with your usage of the term “mini-series” to denote a group of episodes from a TV series that you consider related in some way such as which character is dominant. There is a definition for mini-series and Outlander, nor groups of its episodes, ain’t one. Famous mini-series include Roots, Pillars of the Earth, and Band of Brothers. They are not as long as a series and you would never have more than one season of a mini-series. There’s an Emmy Award for mini-series. So I think you should use phrases like “episodes 1-6” or “the episodes after Claire returns to the past” to avoid confusing readers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miniseries
Miniseries – Wikipedia
A miniseries (or mini-series, also known as a serial in the UK) is a television program that tells a story in a predetermined, limited number of episodes.
en.wikipedia.org
Me: Oh I see smile emoticon:) I stand corrected. There’s me told smile emoticon:) I shall call it a continuing serial drama … It makes me remember Flash Gordon but perhaps that is before your time. The books are continuations rather than a roman fleuve (like Trollope or Proust’s where in each novel a new group of characters flourishes, their story ends and the continuing characters are sometimes background sometimes central.
Oh my goodness! I was hooked on the first season, thanks to your recommendation, and love the actors. I did read about a third of Dragonfly in Amber to prepare for the second season, which I have not yet watched, but found I prefer the opening in modern times to the adventures in 18th-century France. Eventually I’ll get back to this book, but wondered if Gabaldon really wanted to switch to a modern women’s novel and was stuck with another historical novel because of the popularity. But that’s not quite fair, since I haven’t finished it.
Bizarre that Claire is a villain in the third season!
The 18th century section in France is weak — except perhaps for the time in L’hopital des anges and her relationship with Mother Hildegard. I don’t know quite why; the novel seems to be going nowhere and the mini-series loses momentum.
What happens is the series becomes riveting again when seh miscarries and they return to Scotland, about the 8th episode into the 9th (Je Suis Prest — old French for I am ready) and it’s just electrifying because the history is real: from Prestonpans, to retreat, to Culloden; the last episode of the 2nd season has us back in modern world.
Then the opening 5 episodes of the 3rd season go back and forth from the modern world in 1967/68 (as in Dragonfly in Amber) with some account of Jamie, and then the 7th episode we are back into 18th century Scotland closer to mid-1760s.
https://ellenandjim.wordpress.com/2017/10/19/outlander-the-second-season-a-differently-framed-dragonfly-in-amber/
I too find myself more involved in the woman’s novel parts, but I like the Scottish material too.
The books go on and off and so too the series. I’m into the 9th episode of the 3rd season and it’s fallen off again — as they become part of a sailing ship novel headed for Jamaica. It’s more than a little raving mad.
I’ve taken off from the series before but I might as well finish watching this third season and listening to Dragonfly in Amber. Porter does read beautifully and sometimes it’s just fun, some of the episodes, especially when they first meet and take into their lives Fergus, the boy pickpocket; I’ve come to think it’s kind of a Dickensian touch.
One more reply: I find I am so much more satisfied by films which are based on rich books. I watched the new mini-series, Alias Grace and can see its great interest; but it’s there for me because of the books, and probably even half-way fine books can keep me going back to them if the mini-series itself is brilliant, and I think (however half-crazy the action-adventure sometimes becomes), the serial drama of Outlander as filmed is a masterwork of Ronald Moore and his team.
In comparison I am bored by the PBS Collector (period drama on Sunday nights); it’s thin. Downton Abbey had a genius at scripts but even there it was thin after the third season (if you except the rape of Anna as subject matter — that was riveting).
I am man so writing I guess from a male perspective but I thought, again just me, that Frank was portrayed negatively in this series. From what I know, the the third book did go into detail about Frank and Claire’s relationship during the “Boston years”. Gabaldon obviously thought they were no real reason to do so. I see no reason to believe anything other that they had a “convenient” relationship and Frank, as mentioned in the third book, was a pleasant man and a good father. In my view, he is presented as a monster in the show. The first episode really only covered the first chapter of the book. I see no reason why they had to stretch it out like this.
Also Gabaldon has said she wanted each book to be different in style and that they were also “stand alone”. This is a totally different approach to the Poldark novels. Graham adjusted his writing to the mood of the time they were written but maintained a continuity.
Finally I know that some women read these books because of the erotic elements and sexual tension. Not saying that is a bad thing.
On the portrayal of Frank in the films, my sense is it is far more positive or idealized and somewhat emasculated than in the books. It seems to me natural that a man would be angry and hurt by what Claire has to say when she returns, and that he would not get over it. He himself cannot have a child and he hopes that the one Claire gives birth to can substitute. Brianna is for him: in the books and films he loves her selflessly, and he pays for Claire’s education as a physician. But he needs some release and his carping and distrust and then permanent hurt about Claire and anger makes sense. In the films he’s made almost characterless.
As to Gabaldon, I find her sometimes disingenuous. It’s a matter then of seeing what is persistent or recurring: she repeaetedly justifies the films. So she dismisses her sincerely-meant (if length and strength of feeling is a criteria) woman’s book in Boston in the books. I don’t find the Outlander books to be stand alones; I agree that they are not knitted in the same tight way as Graham’s. His are to my mind superior. Hers have repetition, pandering, slacknesses. She needed to cut and a stronger editor would have made stronger books.
I’ve no doubt the books are female erotica — many passages and scenes. In the films it’s a question of what the voyeuristic eye focuses on. It’s argued by psychiatrists and film critics the “female gaze” is one where women bond with the heroine strongly, and when attracted to the male actor, it’s from a position of equal strength. That’s not the case with these gifs that are put on face-book, note anonymously.
Another reply: last night I happened to watch Tobias Menzies in an earlier role — the 2007 Persuasion where he is slowly revealed to be a hardened villain. He is a hardened villain in a LeCarre film from a few years back.
I looked at his face. It has a great deal of what projects as iron in it, iron-faced. This is reinforced by every thing he uses to project his face as Black Jack Randall. Downplayed by behaving quietly as Frank Randall.
I’m saying his persona, or stereotype fits the interpretation you feel as you watch the films. I’ve no doubt he was picked because of this. He feels very strong in a scene as Frank after he has told Claire he is leaving her finally, going back to Oxford, means to marry his mistress and take Brianna. He stalks off — his face an image of bitterness.
I had asked my sister, who had read the novels, about Claire and Frank’s post-WWII marriage. She told me that she came away with the impression that there were no real villains in that marriage . . . and no “heroes”. She thought that both had paid an emotional price for maintaining a marriage that had died for the sake of a child.
Thank you. That’s a sensible interpretation and makes sense to me. Frank could not face not having a child and Claire could not face bringing up a child as a single mother — very hard in the 1950s.
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