The film largely follows the book faithfully, down to some of the male and female divides shown already seeming a bit old-fashioned for 1914. It does make some very notable changes.
More than twenty years had passed since the book was published, and by that point the Civil War was nearly fifty years in the past. It wasn’t as relevant to the film as it was to the book, so all mentions of it or of slavery are dropped. Major Thornton, for example, was a Confederate officer in the novel and Captain Oglethrope was a 1790s slave trader and his encounter with Quasi is much less friendly than the story the film relates. Dropping all of that doesn’t affect the plot and was the right thing to do. Bowdlerizing the Quasi story does leave out an important element, that the magic tree was burned with the village and the four seeds enclosed are the last.
A big difference, and one that explains a lot of the gaps in the film’s logic, is that in the novel, Fred actually is cheating on Lillian with Stella Lovejoy. Lillian and Bessie catch them, much is made over the difference infidelity makes when the perpetrator is a man versus a woman. That is a large part of the reason why Lillian swallowed the first seed.
If you’ve read much Archibald Clavering Gunter, you know he’s not really a comic author. You might think so at first blush: he’s got a light tone, he’s satirical, he’s fond of complements that are dripping with sarcasm, but for all that, he treats his subject matter fairly seriously. The difference from the film to the novel that turns everything on its head is that the one Kitty and BettyLouSpence would have preferred: in the novel, it isn’t a dream. That’s where the four seeds element comes in that the film sets up but then abandons. Lillian takes the first, she gives Jane the second, and then Fred takes the third. And I don’t know why screenwriter Marguerite Bertsch didn’t change it to three but the film is done after that. In the novel, Lawrence dreams of what would happen if the public knew about the last seed. He imagines the newspaper ad—$3,000,000 offered—richest widow in New York in negotiations—the queen who wants to be a king—etc. Frederica is miserable living as woman and is going broke because no one will trust a “doctress’s” care. While Lawrence and Bessie are boarding the ship on their honeymoon, Frederica finally convinces Lawrence to give up the seed by asking what would happen if Bessie should ever stumble onto it. At that, the doctress immediately changes back to a doctor as the tugboats pull the ship off the shore.
The tagline of A Florida Enchantment, the film, is “The Funny Phantasy”, but the book’s not so fantastic. It’s really trying to examine the different ways society treats the sexes and the different reactions society has to one sex behaving or presenting as another. Namely, that gay women are disapproved of but accepted, while gay me are condemned, and Gunter is trying to point out the hypocrisy in that. The film does that too, of course, but it muddles it a bit in trying to make it more of a comedy than it wants to be. The book is satyric but not really a comic.
That was really the public’s response to it, too. One contemporary review—I think it was the Variety one—thought the film was only funny up to Lillian’s transformation and then the comedy all seemed forced onto the plot.
The changes to the film’s plot probably came from the earlier Broadway stage adaptation. In terms of page count, A Florida Enchantment isn’t a long book, but it’s awfully involved with the setting changes from New York to Florida and back constantly. Simplifying things to make them easier to stage with only one New York act makes sense. And it didn’t help that Gunter’s hypocrisy was the accepted view at the time and audience wouldn’t have liked it. We can’t know, though, what the play is like because it’s presumed lost.
There’s been some question over the years about what exactly Lillian/Lawrence’s relationship with Bessie is supposed to represent. Whether its what it looks like today—a look at someone who’s transgender seeking a straight partnership—or if, trying to look at it through what may be Gunter’s lens—the gender-bending is more of a code meant to show discovering one’s lesbianism and marrying another woman. There are arguments to be made for either position, but speaking of coding, the names Lawrence and Clarence were seen as extremely gay in that era. Think Bruce in the 1980s. Calling the character Lawrence was certainly not unintentional.
From what’s there, it’s obvious it would have been tons of fun to watch.