for children, filmic versions traditionally tend to transfigure plots and ideas, and, by so doing, simplify the otherwise more intricate and socio-culturally challenging literary storylines, as is the case, for example, in the majority of classic texts adapted by Disney, which sanitize existing texts to make them palatable for family audiences, be it for financial, artistic, or ideological motivations (see, for instance, Cartmell, 2007; Lefebvre, 2013).
Since the advent of cinema, Johanna Spyri’s Heidi has been adapted for the screen numerous times, with the first of these dating back to 1920 in the form of a silent movie. In most cases, these adaptations have remained faithful to the novel and been in line with Spyri’s intention of showing the healing power of nature and the harms of authoritative education. None of them, however, have included the central religious theme that is present in the Heidi novels (see Hale, 2006), in which Heidi learns to rely on God and then helps her own grandfather to regain his faith too. Nonetheless, all adaptations preserve the moral and social implications of Spyri’s writings, albeit contextualizing them for their audiences, either by expanding their plots or else developing existing characters or by introducing new figures.
Heidi first appeared in print in the late nineteenth century when Swiss author Johanna Spyri wrote two novels recounting the story of a young orphan girl living in the Alps. Heidis Lehr- und Wanderjahre (1880)2 and Heidi kann brauchen, was es gelernt hat (1881) could be categorized as “convert and reform novels” (Usrey, 1985: 232), but they are also heirs to the Swiss pedagogical tradition, particularly to the theories of J. J. Rousseau and J. H. Pestalozzi. The central role of nature in the development of the individual is seminal in Rousseau’s writings, which depict the child as a free spirit, whose mind should be left undisturbed. And just like Spyri does in Heidi, both Rousseau and Pestalozzi chose literary representations of childhood as instruments by which to metaphorically develop an idea or theory in their writings3.
Johanna Spyri’s novels tell the story of 5-year-old Heidi. She is left to live with her grandfather in the Swiss Alps after her Aunt Dete, who has been responsible for her since the death of both Heidi’s parents, finds a good position in Frankfurt, and so she is not able to have the child under her protection anymore. Like many Swiss workers and peasants at the time, Dete has to emigrate to make a living, since poverty and hunger were widespread in 19th century Switzerland. Due to unknown circumstances and his sorrow at having lost his son, Heidi’s grandfather, known by the rest of the villagers as Alm-Öhi, has isolated himself from society and lives by himself in a hut in the mountain. Surprisingly enough – but in accordance with Spyri’s intention to show the benefits of nature for human beings – the girl easily adapts to this new environment: she likes her grandfather and soon becomes friends with a young goatherd named Peter and grows attached to his family, most particularly to his blind grandmother. However, three years later, Dete returns and forces Heidi to join her in Frankfurt, where she is to become the companion of Clara, the daughter of the wealthy Sesemann family. Clara had lost her mother and is confined to a wheelchair. Although she is soon enthralled by Heidi’s innocence and joyful personality and her feelings are shared by her father and her grandmother, Fräulein Rottenmeier, the governess of the house, dislikes the Swiss girl and believes she cannot be a good influence on Clara. Indeed, Rottenmeier is the counterpart to Heidi: while the young protagonist supports her companion and gives her the courage and the desire to walk, to grow and to flourish, Rottenmeier figuratively cripples Clara and hinders her from improving her condition, effectively binding her to her immobility. The pedagogical component of the novels is evident from the very title of the works, whose primary objective is to educate young readers in values and attitudes through Heidi’s adventures. As mentioned before, nature has a pivotal role: the purity of life in the mountains shows the Alps as an idyllic place in contrast to Frankfurt, the city, which destroys the individual rather than sheltering him or her, with Clara in her wheelchair as a metaphor for the damage caused by supposed progress and repressive education.
The purpose of this essay is to examine how the character of Fräulein Rottenmeier has evolved in the various film adaptations of Johanna Spyri’s novels – more specifically, in the animated versions – and to make an attempt to understand the socio-political implications of such an evolution and of the alterations in the depiction of this female figure.
2 From Page to Screen:
The Girl of the Alps Becomes a Moving Image
Among those theories by those who distance themselves from Fidelity Criticism and rather endorse the belief that adapted texts and adaptations engage in a sort of intertextual, intergenerational conversation, one finds the transtextual model as established by Gerard Genette in his The Architext. The author takes inspiration from Bakhtin (dialogism) and Kristeva (intertextuality) to develop his ideas on transtextuality, which he defines as the “textual transcendence of the text, all that sets the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts” (Genette, 1992: 83). Genette talks about five different types of transtextuality, although hypertextuality deserves the most attention, and is also the focus of this analysis. Hypertextuality examines the relations between a text – the hypertext – and its predecessor – the hypotext –, which the hypertext modifies, re-elaborates or amplifies. According to Genette, hypertextuality involves “any relationship uniting a text B (hypertext) to an earlier text A (hypotext), upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary” (Genette, 1997: 5). Thus, hypertextuality represents the relation between a text and a text on which it is based but which it transforms, modifies, elaborates or extends. Spyri’s Heidi has no doubt also been the inspiration of many other literary and filmic products and, as a hypotext, it also includes an archetypical figure – the innocent child-figure who is able to change the lives and attitudes of others and whose goodness is often portrayed in relation to nature. Heidi-like figures include Pollyanna, the protagonist of the homonymous novel by Eleanor H. Porter (1913), Anne Shirley, the main character in Anne of Green Gables (Montgomery, 1907) or Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden (Burnett, 1911).
Most of the cinematic adaptations of Spyri’s novels evidently do not intend to deviate greatly from the hypotext. Such is the case of Luigi Comencini’s Heidi (1952), the first Swiss film adaptation; Delbert Mann’s Heidi (1968), starring Jean Simmons as Fräulein Rottenmeier; or the more recent live-action film versions of the novel released in 1993 and 2015. The former, a three-hour television mini-series with ambitions to become the family entertainment of the year, is a Hollywoodish Walt Disney production, directed by Michael Rhodes, with British actress Jane Seymour playing an unconventionally attractive Fräulein Rottenmeier, and containing all the elements that audiences expect in a feel-good movie for children or family audiences. In contrast, the most recent Swiss version of Heidi (2015) – directed by Alain Gsponer and starring national treasure Bruno Ganz as Heidi’s grandfather and Hannelore Hoger as Frau Sesemann, Clara’s grandmother – does not spare the viewer the sordid elements of the story – poverty and cruelty towards children –, yet shows a joyful, innocent and pure Heidi (Anuk Steffen), just as Spyri might have imagined her in 1880.
However, some film adaptations have transformed or extended the hypotext, in order to retell Heidi’s story in different contexts or for different audiences. For instance, in the famous Hollywood version from 1937, directed by Allan Dwan and starring Shirley Temple in the role of Heidi, the plot is radically altered to become a sort of film noir – a genre that was in vogue at the time – in which good battles evil and in which Fräulein Rottenmeier displays criminal tendencies in a bid not to lose her power inside the Sesemann’s household. The moral element is indeed present but bears no relation to nature; instead it is linked to the presence of innate human features. Likewise, a more recent Heidi (Markus Imboden, 2001) portrays an orphan who is taken to Berlin by her aunt Dete, a successful fashion designer, to become the companion of her very own daughter, Clara, an emotionally deprived teenager, who has no interest in becoming friends with her younger cousin or letting her steal the little attention she receives from her own mother. As in its hypotext, Heidi longs to return to the mountains to be with her grandfather
