Engendering Genre by Reingard M. Nischik

Author:Reingard M. Nischik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT000000, LIT003000
Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
Published: 2010-01-30T05:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSION

Although a change in medium, such as from novel to film, inevitably brings along a shift in audience expectation, and although “the adapted text ... is not something to be reproduced, but rather something to be interpreted and recreated, often in a new medium ... a reservoir of instructions ... that the adapter can use or ignore” (Hutcheon 2006, 84), these tenets of contemporary adaptation theories in my view do not fully legitimize Schlöndorff ’s drastic changes to Atwood’s (or her text’s) intentions/story/spirit, especially considering gender representation. It can be said that the Schlöndorff film makes rather a “his-story” of Atwood’s “her-story”—Atwood warns us in her “near-future novel” or “speculative fiction” (Howells 2006a, 161, and Atwood 1989, 103) about potential consequences of the political, social, religious, and ecological trends in the United States, particularly from a female perspective and focusing on women’s stories. By this shift in gender perspective, the film “remasculinizes” the traditionally masculine dystopian genre, which Atwood precisely complemented in her novel by rendering the events from a female and, at the same time, marginal as well as largely internal perspective. As Howells perceptively states,

Atwood gives us a dissident account by a Handmaid who has been relegated to the margins of political power. This narrative strategy reverses the structural relations between public and private worlds of the dystopia, allowing Atwood to reclaim a feminine space of personal emotions and individual identity, which is highlighted by her first-person narrative. ... By an irony of history, it is Offred the silenced Handmaid who becomes Gilead’s principal historian when that oral “herstory” is published two hundred years later. (2006a, 164, 165)

Just as the historians in the “Historical Notes” can only see the world from a masculine point of view and thereby once again refuse to recognize and appreciate Offred’s “her-story,” so too the film unfortunately “mainstreams” Atwood’s revisionist text as to genre and gender. Again gender issues considerably stamp the design of the genre (here dystopia) as a whole, with Atwood transcending traditional generic boundaries and Schlöndorff, in the mass medium of film, pushing back the focus to a traditional view of genre and gender, here mainly in the context of a Hollywood thriller.

Thus, Atwood’s first (and, to date, last) venture to Hollywood has not been particularly successful by any account—even considering Hutcheon’s proposal that “knowing audiences have expectations—and demands. It may be less, as Béla Balázs tried to insist, that ‘a masterpiece is a work whose subject ideally suits its medium’ and therefore cannot be adapted ... than a case of a ‘masterpiece’ being a work a particular audience cherishes and resists seeing changed” (2006, 122). With a highly intellectual, critical, and elaborate writer such as Atwood, chances are that her works will not fare too well in mainstream Hollywood films in the future either. After the disappointment of Atwood connoisseurs (and film critics) over the film version of The Handmaid’s Tale, and probably Atwood’s own disenchantment with the adaptation, it will be interesting to see whether another attempt at an Atwood (Hollywood) film version will see the light of day.

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