Women at the edge: encounters with the Cornish coast in British film and television

Abstract

In this article, I explore the particular liminality of the Cornish coast and its representation in film and television through the figure of the woman at the cliff edge. This figure has been significant in representations of Cornwall, Britain's most south-westerly territory, across painting, literature, film and television since the beginning of the twentieth century, and has operated as a trope through which anxieties around identity and social change have been expressed and explored. Responding to recent calls by scholars in film and television studies to examine more closely the connections between painting and audio-visual media (e.g. Harper 2010), I consider the significance of the figure of the woman at the edge of the Cornish coast in representations of identity at moments of transition, for example in wartime or at other moments of profound social change. Drawing connections between the early twentieth-century paintings of Dame Laura Knight and film and television texts across the century, including the film While I Live (1947) and the television serials The Camomile Lawn (1992) and Coming Home (1998), I attempt to draw out and explore what might be described as a key ‘place-image’ of Cornwall, the woman at the cliff edge.

Notes

^1. Cornwall received European Objective One funding on precisely this claim to difference and separateness from England (Deacon 2004).

^2. For example, in heritage costume drama (e.g. Poldark [BBC, 1975–1976], in comedy and in horror, as I explore elsewhere (Moseley 2013, forthcoming).

^3. Although, of course, Scotland has nation status, while Cornwall does not. It should be noted that in contrast to work on Balkan and Scottish cinema, at issue in this essay are a set of representations which come entirely from without the space being represented. Unlike Scotland and the Balkan nations, Cornish indigenous cinema production is in its infancy (though I do look at Cornwall's self-representation in Moseley [forthcoming]).

^4. See Goodman (2010) for groundbreaking research on alternative constructions of identity in the literatures of Cornwall.

^5. I am indebted to Misha Kavka and Flavia Laviosa for their invaluable comments on the notion of ‘peninsularity’ at the Screen Studies Conference, University of Glasgow, July 2012. See Laviosa (2010) for a suggestive discussion of filmmakers' use of the Apulian peninsular.

^6. The political group, Mabyon Kernow (Brothers of Cornwall), formed in 1951, campaign for devolution to Cornwall and a Cornish Assembly.

^7. Thornton (1997) discusses GWR publicity figuring Cornwall as a foreign place, linking the peninsular explicitly with Italy and making links between the Cornish and Breton ‘Monts St Michel’ (64).

^8. See, for instance, the children's version of this story where the tale is described as taking place on ‘the Rugged Cornish coast, where the land meets the sea … in West Penwith, the most mysterious part of all Cornwall’ (Causley 2001). Wormell's (2005) children's story The Sea Monster also features a monstrous but kindly creature who is sometimes part of the land, sometimes part of the water, moving easily between the two.

^9. This film seems to have been inspired by the earlier, better known Gainsborough melodrama Love Story, which also features a female pianist/composer, Lissa (Margaret Lockwood) facing death and inspired by the Cornish cliff-top (Moseley 2010). ‘The Dream of Olwen’, the central piece of music in While I Live, also has echoes of the ‘Cornish Rhapsody’ composed by Hubert Bath for Love Story.

^10. Dame Laura Knight RA (1977–1970), ‘In the open air’, 16 June to 8 September 2012, Penlee House Gallery and Museum, Penzance, Cornwall. See Knowles (2012).

^11. In her earlier work in Cornwall, Knight had worked on plein air paintings of groups of young women, bathing and sunworshipping on the Cornish coast, on the rocks around secluded coastal pools. Unable to secure local girls to pose nude in the open air, Knight's models for these works were brought to Cornwall from London (Fox 1988, 34). The later, clothed paintings I refer to here include ‘Lamorna Cove’, ‘On the Cliffs’, ‘The Cornish Coast’ and ‘The Dark Pool’.

^12. See Moseley (2013) for a fuller discussion of these stylistic distinctions and the relationship of Newlyn School imagery to Poldark (BBC, 1975).

^13. Deacon (2001) and Hockenhull (2005) also comment on the ‘waiting women’ of the Newlyn School.

^14. It is worth noting that while the Carey-Lewises, perhaps because of their class identity, seem more closely connected with London than Cornwall, ‘Loveday’ is an old Cornish name and the character is closely associated with the Cornish landscape in both novel and television adaptation, through narrative, setting and framing.

^15. Though the description is inaccurate – the model wears a headscarf with the long tail over one shoulder. This seems to be artistic license and Wesley is most likely recalling this painting from memory, as the articles on Knight's work in The Studio do not feature any of Knight's cliff-top works.

^16. The recent film Summer In February (Christopher Menaul, UK, 2013) explores the lives of the Lamorna artists, including Knight, and which the trope of the clifftop woman in the same way as the texts discussed here.

^17. It is notable that in the British television adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca (Carlton Television, 1997), the cottage that is the site of Rebecca's (Lucy Cohu) infidelity and demise is positioned at the end of the beach, precisely at the boundary between land and sea, and in the television serialisation of Susan Howatch's Cornish family epic Penmarric (BBC, 1979), Mark's (Thomas Ellice) first sexual encounter takes place in an identically positioned cottage.

^18. While set in West Penwith, the adaptation was filmed at Parc Broom, Veryan, on the Roseland Peninsular in South Cornwall.

^19. The score is by Stephen Edwards and is based on Ravel's String Quartet in F Major.

^20. When Sophy encounters him a second time she pushes past him and he falls to his death on the rocks below.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rachel Moseley

Rachel Moseley is Associate Professor in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. She is Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded project ‘A History of Television for Women in Britain, 1947–1989’ and is writing a book about Cornwall in film and television.