Acknowledgements

Firstly, I would like to express my eternal gratitude to Imelda Whelehan, a font of all knowledge and the bearer of extensive wisdom.

Heidi Macpherson, for valuable feedback throughout the MA, in particular this dissertation, and for the loan of various Atwood resources.

Alfie, my constant four-legged companion, who despite being unable to provide any feedback or guidance on my writing, has fuelled my imagination and been a source of inspiration and motivation during lengthy walks through the landscape of Birmingham and beyond.

Various friends, family and work colleagues who have endured lengthy periods of my academic absorption and inability to attend various occasions.

Finally, and the most sincerest of thanks of all, to Chris Cuthbert for the continual emotional support throughout the past two years and providing me with the encouragement to persevere.

To all of the above, the warmest of thanks and here’s to the possibility of a utopian future!

*Front cover image from Metropolis, Fritz Lang, 1927

2 Abstract

Adaptation studies is an evolving multidisciplinary field that continues to provide much critical academic debate regarding a definitive theory of literary adaptation. Current studies within the field, not only reveal a lack of consideration of critical analysis of dystopian literary adaptations, but also neglect to consider the marginalised sub-genre of feminist dystopias and the representation of women within filmic adaptations. The purpose of this dissertation, therefore, is to explore this seemingly neglected area by providing an insight into dystopian literary adaptations and how the presentation of the female character is transferred from text to screen.

The first chapter explores the genre of the dystopia, both within literature and film, in order to provide a basis for the ensuing critical analysis. I will consider two texts that are often regarded as feminist dystopias, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives (1972) and their respective adaptations, Volker Schlöndorff’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1990), Brian Forbes’s The Stepford Wives (1975) and Frank Oz’s The Stepford Wives (2004). Each text/adaptation will be discussed to establish where within the genre it can be positioned and will then be examined within its historical context and in relation to the feminist movement.

Chapter two contains a thorough analysis of both The Handmaid’s Tale and The Stepford Wives in terms of how the respective adaptations represent women on screen in terms of identity, status, and role. This particular chapter begins with a consideration of feminist film theory, predominantly using the work of Laura Mulvey and her inferences to the “gaze” within cinema, and how this relates to the presentation of women on screen. An in-depth consideration of central female characters ensues, with reference to the protagonist, matriarch and the subversive/feminist. This chapter will seek to highlight the patriarchal ideology of the utopian female as portrayed in both text and adaptation.

3 The final chapter reveals the problematical nature of film production regarding the transferral of text to screen, with particular reference to the potential issue of gender bias, not only in the direction of adaptations, but also the authorship of the precursor text. The primary aim of the chapter is to establish the potential failure of the feminist dystopian literary adaptation due to gender influence from authorship to the production stage.

In the conclusion, I will assess the success of the dystopian literary adaptation in (re)presenting women on screen and to what extent gender through production has playing a role in the adaptation’s potential success or failure. I will also assess how far the media have moved on from Levin’s original text in 1975 to the present in terms of the presentation of women on screen.

4 Contents

Page

Acknowledgements 2

Abstract 3

Table of Contents 5

List of Figures 7

1. Introduction 8

2. Dystopia as Genre 10 2.1 Utopia and the feminist text 10 2.2 Critical utopia 11 2.3 The dystopian genre 12 2.3.1 Dystopia in literature 12 2.3.2 Critical dystopia 14 2.3.3 Feminist dystopia 16 2.3.4 Ambiguity of the genre 20 2.3.5 The persistence of hope 20 2.4 Dystopian literary adaptations 22

3. (Re)presentation of Women 26 3.1 Male and female “gaze” 26 3.2 Giving the female role a “name” 28 3.3 The status of the female 31 3.4 (Re)presentation of individual female roles 37 3.4.1 The protagonist 38 3.4.2 Passivity of the protagonist 43 3.4.3 Mentality of the protagonist 46 3.4.4 The mother or matriarch 49 3.4.5 The subversive/feminist 53 3.5 Sexuality and reproduction 57 3.6 Physicality and the body 59 3.7 The idea of the “perfect” woman 62

4. Adaptation as Process 68 4.1 Sexuality versus textuality 69 4.2 Patriarchal domination of the film industry 71 4.3 Collaborative nature of the film industry 72 4.4 Cinematic standardisation 73 4.5 Harking back to the past (rather than the future) 77 4.6 Historical context 78 4.7 Interiority of character 80

5. Conclusion 84

5 Bibliography 86

Filmography 92

Appendices Appendix 1: Dystopian Sub-genres 97 Appendix 2: Dystopian Text/Adaptation/Feminism Timeline 98 Appendix 3: Character Mapping 100 Appendix 4: The Handmaid’s Tale: Hierarchy of Women 101 Appendix 5: The Handmaid’s Tale Film Posters 102 Appendix 6: Science-fiction Adaptations, 1980 to Present, USA 103 Box Office Revenues

6 List of Figures

Page 1 Components of the feminist dystopia 21 2 Joanna as blank-eyed automaton, The Stepford Wives, 1975 32 3 Woman as protector of literature, Fahrenheit 451, 1966 32 4 Colour coding of the women of Gilead, The Handmaid’s Tale, 35 1990 5 Kate (Offred), The Handmaid’s Tale, 1990 40 6 Joanna Eberhart, The Stepford Wives, 1975 41 7 Dale Coba’s voyeuristic view of Joanna, The Stepford Wives, 42 1975 8 Joanna Eberhart, The Stepford Wives, 2004 42 9 Joanna and the psychiatrist, The Stepford Wives, 1975 47 10 Aerial shot of Kate (Offred), The Handmaid’s Tale, 1990 48 11 Joanna following her nervous collapse, The Stepford Wives, 2004 48 12 Kate’s anguish as mother, The Handmaid’s Tale, 1990 50 13 Serena Joy as matriarch, The Handmaid’s Tale, 1990 50 14 Voyeuristic view of the Eberhart family, The Stepford Wives, 1975 51 15 Carol Van Sant, The Stepford Wives, 1975 51 16 Claire Wellington, The Stepford Wives, 2004 52 17 Moira as alternative Handmaid, The Handmaid’s Tale, 1990 54 18 Moira’s escape (bathroom scene), The Handmaid’s Tale, 1990 55 19 Kate through the rear view mirror, The Handmaid’s Tale, 1990 55 20 The transformation of Bobbie, The Stepford Wives, 2004 56 21 The “Ceremony” - Serena Joy’s POV, The Handmaid’s Tale, 1990 58 22 Voyeuristic sex scene, The Handmaid’s Tale, 1990 58 23 Kate naked at bedroom window, The Handmaid’s Tale, 1990 60 24 Joanna and Bobbie, masculinised clothing, The Stepford Wives, 61 1975 25 Ike Mazzard’s sketch of Joanna, The Stepford Wives, 1975 61 26 The robot Maria, Metropolis, 1927 63 27 Moloko Bar, A Clockwork Orange, 1971 65 28 A mannequin crossing the road, The Stepford Wives, 1975 65 29 Wife as cash machine, The Stepford Wives, 2004 66 30 The Men’s Association, The Stepford Wives, 1975 74 31 Supermarket scene, The Stepford Wives, 1975 74 32 Woman hanging - the Salvagings, The Handmaid’s Tale, 1990 76 33 USA/UK film poster, The Handmaid’s Tale 76 34 Opening sequence of Pleasantville, 1998 78 35 Opening sequence of The Stepford Wives, 2004 78 36 Kate’s view of “unwomen” from the bus, The Handmaid’s Tale 81 37 Voyeuristic view of Joanna, The Stepford Wives, 1975 82

7 1. Introduction

I wait. I compose myself. My self is a thing I must now compose, as one composes a speech. What I must present is a made thing, not something born.1

When you come back, there will be a woman with my name and my face, she'll cook and clean like crazy, but she won't take pictures and SHE WON'T BE ME!2

At the time of the publication of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, there was evidently only one previous text subsumed within the sub-genre of the feminist dystopia, Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives. Several years later with the premiere of Volker Schlondorff’s adaptation of Atwood’s text in 1990, comparisons between the two texts continued to be made with Rita Kempley’s film review stating:

Volker Schlöndorff’s numbing adaptation of “The Handmaid’s Tale” finds the Stepford Wives alive and well and living in the not-too-distant futuristic Republic of Gilead. 3

There are frequent considerations of the similarities between The Handmaid’s Tale to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four due to their dystopian nature but there are insufficient analyses of the inherent feminist themes within either text, in particular The Handmaid’s Tale. In this context, The Stepford Wives can be deemed a more appropriate text for comparison. The central themes of both texts revealing the patriarchal subjugation of the female via social and cultural coercion or by technological means within a futuristic bleak landscape.

The respective adaptations of the texts should elevate the marginalised genre of the feminist dystopia, and indeed the dystopian genre as a whole, from its inferior status within literature by presenting contemporary and historical reflections on the status of society and women. This work will seek to examine the commonalities and differences between both The Handmaid’s Tale and The Stepford Wives in terms of the precursor texts and their respective adaptations. I will consider how the author chooses to present

1 Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale, London: Virago Press Limited, 1987, p.76 2 Forbes, Bryan, The Stepford Wives, 1975 3 Kempley, Rita, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, The Washington Post, 9 March 1990

8 women within the text and align this to the directors’ (re)presentation of the female on screen in terms of role, status and historical context, with particular reference to the feminist movement.4 As Kempley states above, Schlöndorff seemingly fails to present a satisfactory representation of Atwood’s text with the production of a “numbing adaptation”. Therefore, consideration will be given to the extent to which the (re)presentation of women within the adaptation is a product of the male perspective (author and director) – or as Mulvey terms, the male “gaze” – and the continuation of established social and cultural norms regarding gender status. The intertextuality of the adaptations will be considered in terms of production issues in order to assess whether the adaptors reveal the essence of the feminist themes contained within the precursor text. As suggested by the two opening quotations, I will seek to establish whether the adaptations of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Stepford Wives are products of the male perspective, providing the audience with literally and physically man-made women.

4 It is interesting to note that the adaptations in question are chronologically equidistant: The Stepford Wives (1975), The Handmaid’s Tale (1990) and The Stepford Wives (2004).

9 2. Dystopia as Genre

In order to focus on the representation of women within dystopian literary adaptations, it is first necessary to place the adaptations in question, The Handmaid’s Tale and The Stepford Wives, into historical context concerning both the dystopian genre and the feminist movement. As stated previously, dystopia as a genre (or speculative fiction) is regarded as literarily inferior to other genres.5 When combined with the apparent negation of feminist themes, particularly within the dystopian text, and the further exacerbation by the fidelity issue within adaptation theory, the difference in gender perspectives and the extent to which the dystopia amplifies such differences, this under researched area deserves further critical analysis.

2.1 Utopia and the feminist text The twentieth-century was evidently the domain of the male orientated dystopia or the feminist utopia. The beginning of the century saw the emergence of feminist science-fiction literature with the publication of the first seminal feminist utopian text, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915). However, this was promptly followed by decades of male authored dystopian texts, such as Zamyatin’s We (1921), Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (1962). Both The Handmaid’s Tale and The Stepford Wives can be regarded as feminist texts.6 They reflect key themes of the feminist movement – the status of the female within society and the issue of sexism with the advocation of patriarchal control – from the perspective of the female protagonist. The texts are somewhat unique in the dystopian genre as the majority of dystopian texts written throughout the twentieth century do not focus solely on feminist

5 Atwood, in an interview regarding her novel Oryx and Crake, emphasises the distinction between science-fiction and what she terms as “speculative fiction: "Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen” (Atwood, Margaret, ‘Light in the wilderness’, interview with Robert Potts for The Guardian (online), Saturday 26 April 2003) 6 The feminist text incorporates a variety of themes that relate to the positioning of the female within society in terms of the social, political and economic constraints and the relation to the inequality of the sexes. It does not does necessarily make inference specifically to the feminist movement.

10 issues (with the exception of Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night, 1937) and were written from the male perspective.

It was not until the 1970s that the literary world witnessed the influx of several feminist utopian texts, such as Walk to the End of the World (the first in the series of The Holdfast Chronicles) by Suzy McKee Charnas (1974), The Female Man by Joanna Russ (1975) and Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy (1976).7 The publication of such texts could be seen as a direct response to the development of second-wave feminism at the beginning of the 1960s and also the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963, in which Friedan voiced her concerns regarding the apparent discontent of US female housewives.8 Friedan proposed that discontent was a result of the relegation of the intelligent, independent female to the role of wife and mother by patriarchal society, or as termed by Friedan “the problem with no name”. Rather than the female author being confined to the literal meaning of the term utopia, they sought the alternative meaning of the term, “a good place”.9 Female authors were seeking an escape from the drudgery of everyday life and were longing for some form of fantastical utopia. A utopia in which the traditional view of the role of the female was transcended and battle between the sexes was extinguished. The utopian space allowed the presentation of a possible world in which the patriarch was no longer dominant.

2.2 Critical utopia In this respect, many feminist utopias can be regarded, in Moylan’s terms, as “critical utopias”. The focus of the critical utopia is to highlight the imperfections within the perfect society rather than emphasising the imperfections within contemporary society - the impossibility of possibility is accentuated. The media began to challenge governmental movements towards the control of the population with “new opposition being deeply infused with the politics of autonomy, democratic socialism, ecology, and

7 See Appendix Two: Text/Adaptation/Feminism Timeline, p.98 8 Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique, London: Penguin Books, 2010 9 Utopia is derived from the Greek word ou-topos meaning literally “no place” or “nowhere”.

11 especially feminism.”10 To an extent both The Handmaid’s Tale and The Stepford Wives can be regarded as critical utopias as they meet all the criteria in Moylan’s statement. Both texts seek to highlight the negative connotations of an enforced patriarchal society (a supposedly male utopia) and the effect on that society’s female population. However, the critical utopia assumes that society is already deemed to be perfect. In the case of the texts in question, both authors seek to establish a society that has been malformed to such an extent that escape is virtually impossible for the protagonist.

2.3 The dystopian genre The latter end of the twentieth century revealed an increasing interest in the dystopian text with the prominence of utopian fiction yielding to a proliferation of texts concerning dystopias – the emergence of a backlash within literature to the ideology of the perfect world. Against this literary background, second- wave feminism was experiencing a transformation with the 1980s being considered as an era of “backlash”.11 Women were seeking their own personal utopias – the integration of career and family life. This resulted in the deterioration of feminist collective politics as the personal literally became political. Cultural and political inequalities were becoming inextricably linked and the difference in the perspectives of the sexes became more than evident. One woman’s dream was developing into one man’s nightmare (and vice versa, depending upon the individual’s perspective). The dominance of patriarchal society continued with the refusal to accept women as anything other than mere “handmaids”.

2.3.1 Dystopia in literature Both The Handmaid’s Tale and The Stepford Wives, as texts, reflect such negativity within society due to an evident battle of the sexes in which the male appears as outright winner and the female as subjugated contestant. As typical dystopias, they express the state of their respective current

10 Moylan, Tom, Demand the Impossible: Science fiction and the utopian imagination, Methuen: London, 1986, p.11 11 The second wave feminist movement within the 1980s encompassed the “backlash” era. The era was regarded as a period of critical analysis of the progress made by women since the 1950s.

12 societies and provide a view of a potentially bleak future. Science-fiction and dystopias, in their various media, are regarded as male-dominated genres. The reader witnesses the presentation of the female within the dystopian society through a male point of view against a palimpsestuous background of the amalgamation of past, present and future. The protagonist is almost certainly male with women being placed on the periphery as secondary characters. This reinforces the male oppression of women with the female being subjugated to reproductive roles, as in Huxley’s Brave New World or the object of sexual desire, as in Zamyatin’s We (or A Clockwork Orange in terms of sexual violence). The male domination of the dystopian genre together with the categorisation of many texts within the genre as canonical ensures that the feminist dystopia is marginalised.

In terms of the texts in question, it is necessary to establish where they can be positioned in terms of the literary world and within the dystopian genre. Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives was, at the time of writing (1972), regarded as futuristic fiction belonging more to the science-fiction genre, with its introduction of automatons, than the dystopian genre. It was, and is today, also regarded as popular literature, only gaining notoriety and cult status following Bryan Forbes’s filmic adaptation three years after publication. The text is somewhat contradictory in nature as it the author is male (potentially more complicated for a male author to consider feminist themes), yet feminist themes are adequately portrayed throughout the work.12 The 1960s and 1970s can be viewed as the era of gender within speculative fiction with male writers within this period approaching science-fiction in a different way with the exploration of gender issues and themes becoming predominant within the text.

On the other hand, The Handmaid’s Tale can be viewed as a progression of the dystopian genre. The text is speculative and futuristic encompassing a variety of genres from the dystopia, the romance plot, epistolary novel and satire with Atwood herself describing the text as “a cognate of A Clockwork

12 The gender of the author, together with the gender of the director, will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter concerning production issues.

13 Orange, Brave New World, and Nineteen Eighty-Four”.13 One cannot ignore the close proximity of the publication of Atwood’s text to George Orwell’s supposedly ill-fated year and the similarity of dystopian themes contained within both texts. It is deemed to be canonical due to Atwood’s concentration on feminist themes contained within a potential future society and serves as a response to the 1980s backlash against the women’s liberation movement. Both texts are inherently dystopian in nature and can be viewed as polysemic texts insomuch as they invite multiple readings depending on gender perspective and historical context.

2.3.2 Critical Dystopia Both texts were published within the period of what Moylan deems to be the “critical dystopia” phase of the genre. The critical dystopia proposes potential causes of the evolution of the dystopian society rather than simply presenting a vision of a desperate future world. It is grounded in contemporary reality and contains critical reflections of past, present and future society which is seen through the eyes of the protagonist. Almost akin to the bildungsroman genre, we witness the journey of the protagonist from their previous world into the new, dystopian world.14 We observe their struggle for survival in the harsh, totalitarian society, envisaging at every step the individual’s critique of the new world and the omnipresent potential for escape. The focus of the text is the political, social and economic elements of the individual’s existence.

Atwood’s insistence that The Handmaid’s Tale must be regarded as speculative fiction firmly places the text not only within the realm of the dystopian genre, but within the critical dystopia. The text depicts the fundamental themes evident within any dystopia with the presentation of a totalitarian regime ruled by an extremist patriarchy, stratification of the individual’s status within that regime, the restriction of the freedom of the individual through subjugation and surveillance, and the survival and potential

13 Tolan, Linda, ‘Feminist Utopias and Questions of Liberty: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale as Critique of Second Wave Feminism’, Women: a cultural review, Volume 16 Issue 1, 2005, pp.18-32 14 Bildungsroman as a coming of age novel that presents the psychological, moral and social shaping of the protagonist.

14 escape of the individual. Atwood combines the above themes with the idea of theocracy and Christian fundamentalism (which was becoming an increasing concern at the time of writing in the late 1980s), allowing inferences to religion to dominate the text. The text is a critical dystopia due to the allusion to the past, allows the reader to evaluate the severity of the present and the potential future. The past and present of the society of Gilead are revealed through the recollections of the alienated female protagonist, Offred. With Atwood’s inclusion of the epilogue containing “Historical Notes”, the text becomes autobiographical. The reader obtains a critique of Offred’s present (our potential future) through her recollections. This emphasis on recollection and nostalgia posits another feature of the critical dystopia, the projection of hope. The utopian impulse is revealed with Atwood’s open ending with the final line of the main body of narrative as Offred seemingly escapes from the regime:

And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light.15

The reader experiences a lack of resolution to Offred’s future through both the main narrative and Atwood’s addition of the Historical Notes.

Whilst it is straightforward to position The Handmaid’s Tale within the critical dystopia, the confinement of The Stepford Wives to the genre is relatively problematical. The text exhibits many features of the dystopia, such as patriarchal dominance, conformity of the individual together with the loss of identity, and survival and potential escape, but seems to possess more anti- utopian than critical dystopian tendencies. The reader encounters Levin’s satirical attack on the male utopian ideal through the introduction of the “perfect” wife. Levin’s introduction of the female automaton also places the text within the science-fiction genre, rather than the dystopia. However, the inclusion of such technological advancement merely serves as a warning to contemporary patriarchal society. The text appears to have a definite ending with the protagonist, Joanna Eberhart, succumbing to the “Men’s Association’s” enforcement of control through being transformed into an

15 Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale, op.cit, p.307

15 automated wife. However, in the closing paragraphs of the text Joanna’s transformation is only implied through her alteration of dialogue, there is no definitive confirmation that change has occurred. Levin also chooses to include dialogue between newcomers Ruthanne Hendry and her husband, thus leaving an open ending for Ruthanne’s future existence.

Evidently there is certain amount of what Moylan terms “genre-blurring” within the text.16 The Stepford Wives encompasses several different genres and contains a plethora of intertextuality. However, the text does seem to belong predominantly to the critical dystopia. Levin adheres to the characteristics of the critical dystopia, with the provision of a critique of the past, present and potential future influence, and reaction to, the women’s liberation movement through the eyes of a single, female protagonist. We see the protagonist’s struggle to survive in a male-dominated society and her attempted escape. The text not only provides all the features of the stereotypical dystopia but also provides an in-depth analysis of contemporary and potential position of the female within society.

2.3.3 Feminist Dystopia The expansion of feminist political dissent into the area of literature through the genre of the dystopia, in particular the critical dystopia, commenced during the era of the initialisation of second-wave feminism. Politics, particularly within the USA, revealed a progression from the surfeit of feminist utopias of the early 1970s to the feminist dystopia at the latter end of the century. The feminist dystopia can be viewed as a product of a combination of the progression of the women’s liberation movement and the influx of feminist utopian writing. The only feminist dystopian work, prior to The Stepford Wives, was that of Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night, which was published in 1937 during a male-dominated dystopian decade.17

16 Baccolini, Raffaella and Moylan, Tom (eds), Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, London: Routledge, 2003, p.7 17 An illustration of the marginality of the genre can be seen in Appendix One, p.97

16 As Cavalcanti states, the feminist dystopia enabled the author to present focused narrative conflicts via: “imaginative strategies, more easily achieved in speculative fiction modes, amount[ing] to a feminist political stance and a radical critique of empirical power relations.”18 Through the genre the female author was able to amplify the continual power struggle between the sexes and highlight the oppression of women. The social aspect of the critical dystopia was utilised in order to project the potential future society, in terms of how society constructs gender roles, the significance of reproduction in the definition of gender and ultimately gender imbalance – the inequality of power in all aspects of life, whether it be political, economical or personal, between men and women. The feminist dystopia supplemented the critical dystopia by not only concentrating on a single protagonist’s struggle with the totalitarian regime, but focusing on the group struggle.19

Female authors began to question the inherently male discourse of the dystopian genre through the exploration of themes such as the representation of women, sexuality and reproduction within a potentially bleak futuristic context. Female dystopian authorship extended beyond the overtly sexual themes, such as those presented in male authored texts such as Brave New World and A Clockwork Orange, to explore the reasoning behind the disintegration of society, particularly in terms of relationships and gender politics. The texts are self-reflexive, situating the female as the focal point of the narrative and therefore, allowing the female to be critically analysed as a subject within a futuristic landscape. The masculine agenda of science-fiction with the protagonist as adventurous hero is usurped in the feminist critical dystopia with the emphasis on the subjugation and degradation of the passive, female protagonist. As Kray states:

The sub-genre of the feminist dystopia offers ostensibly feminist stories predicated on the assumption that, dismal as real-life sexism can be,

18 Cavalcanti, Ildney, ‘The Writing of Utopia and the Feminist Critical Dystopia: Suzy McKee Charnas’s Holdfast Series’ in Baccolini, Raffaella and Moylan, Tom (eds), Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, London: Routledge, 2003, p.53 19 Both the titles of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Stepford Wives suggest that the protagonist is a fragment of a broader female collective. Further reference to this is provided in section 3.2 Giving the female role a “name”p.27

17 you ain’t seen nothing yet. If reality displeases you, you’ll hate the fantasy.20

The feminist dystopia returns women to their pre-defined, stereotypical roles, in order to provide a satirical tirade against the continual lack of social progress for the female.

The Stepford Wives, published at the height of the women’s liberation movement (the beginning of second-wave feminism), contains direct references to Betty Friedan and predominantly anti-male themes, therefore, it is difficult not to label the text as a feminist dystopia. The text, and the adaptation in 1975, resulted in the integration of the term “Stepford Wife” as a cultural expression in daily life: “a woman enslaved to a patriarchal definition of femininity, a wife who has no life, who is almost literally an automaton.”21 Women in the text suffer from Friedan’s “the problem with no name” as a result of subjugation by patriarchal society.22 They become enslaved within the American suburban community of Stepford due to their husband’s desire to contain the female aspiration for a life and career outside domesticity. Not content with entrapment, the husbands seek to further the pacification of the female by murdering their wives and replacing them with automatons. Thus revealing the potential extremist nature of male dissatisfaction with the female desire for independence. Through this the text conveys a duality of function as it serves as a warning both to the continuation of near absolute male dominance within society and to the more radical elements within the women’s liberation movement.

Similarly the subjugation of women is more than evident within The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood states that the text is only feminist “insofar as giving a woman a voice and an inner life will always be considered “feminist”

20 Kray, Susan, ‘The Things Women Don’t Say’, in Westfahl, Gary and Slusser, George Edgar (eds.), Science Fiction, Canonization, Marginalization, and the Academy, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., 2002, p.38 21 Williams, Anne, ‘The Stepford Wives: What’s a Living Doll to Do in a Postfeminist World?’, in Brabon, Benjamin A. and Genz, Stephanie (eds.), Postfeminist Gothic: Critical Interventions in Contemporary Culture, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p.85 22 Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique, London: Penguin Books, 2010

18 by those who think women ought not to have these things.”23 She argues that the text cannot be feminist in the strictest sense as the male characters/population within Gilead are subjected to similar societal constraints to the female: It is narrated by a woman, but the same society narrated by a man would still be a dystopia, and that is why a number of men in the book are fighting against the regime, they don’t like it either – they want to get back to doing all those things they liked doing before.24

However, as Howells states, Atwood “turns the traditionally masculine dystopian genre upside down.”25 The narrative structure of the plot transcends the typically masculine dystopian public versus private space and makes the political personal. Throughout the text the reader bears witness to the emotional torment of Offred at the hands of extremist patriarchal society.

The mid-1980s can be viewed as a significant period in the feminist movement as it progressed through the second-wave “backlash” to the post- feminist era. Atwood’s text was published against a background of increasingly infertility within the USA with concomitant (and interrelated) concerns regarding environmental issues. The text conveys themes similar to P.D. James’ The Children of Men (also adapted for the screen in 2006 by Alfonso Cuarón) published several years later in 1992. Whilst many male- authored dystopian texts within the period are concerned with the advancement of information technology, Atwood concentrates on what Mohr deems to be the “technology of power”.26 Throughout the text we see the Atwood’s preoccupation with the socio-political aspects of the society of Gilead with specific interest in the harsh treatment of the female population rather than a focus on fantastical vehicular transport and hyper-galactic

23 Atwood, Margaret, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake “In Context”’, PMLA, Volume 119 Issue 2, 2004, p.516 24 Howells, Carol Ann, ‘Round table with Margaret Atwood’ in ‘Lacroix, Jean-Michel, Leclaire, Jacques and Warwick, Jack (eds.), The Handmaid’s Tale, roman proteen, Conference de Margaret Atwood: Genese du roman et fonction des Notes Historiques, Publications de l.Universite de Rouen No. 253, November 1998, p.16 25 Howells, Carol Ann (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p.164 26 Mohr, Dunja M., ‘The Poetic Discourse of the Split Self: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale’ in Worlds Apart? Dualism and Transgression in Contemporary Female Dystopias, London: McFarland and Company, Inc. Publishers, 2005, p.239

19 methods of communication. The text is thoroughly grounded in themes, which can, without a doubt, categorise it as a work within the confines of feminist dystopian literature.

2.3.4 Ambiguity of the Genre Both The Handmaid’s Tale and The Stepford Wives, as discussed earlier, are, to an extent, subject to genre blurring. They may appear to exhibit the utopian desire for perfection juxtaposed with the appearance of the dystopian society, a product of such desire. The ambiguity of the dystopian genre, especially feminist dystopias can be adequately summarised with the title of Ursula Le Guin’s 1974 text The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Dystopia. The contradictory nature of the genre is evident as the author seeks to both expose the faults in contemporary society whilst searching for a utopia that essentially may already exist. Such tension between utopia and dystopia can be regarded as central to second-wave feminism as we see a move from the absolute feminist ideals of first-wave feminism to a more critically aware feminist movement.

The Handmaid’s Tale reveals a multitude of layers relating to the various definitions of dystopia throughout the novel, from Offred’s narration (interiority of character and therefore, classical dystopia) to speculative fiction, as described by Atwood, to potential utopia. Similarly, The Stepford Wives exhibits tendencies towards either utopia or dystopia based upon reader perspective. The utopian society created by the Stepford Men’s Association becomes the dystopia of the female population of Stepford. Both texts become palimpsestuous in nature due to their allusions to other genres, sub- genres and intertextuality.

2.3.5 The persistence of hope The feminist dystopia relies heavily on the interdependency between the dystopia and the utopia. Texts emerging post-1980 are reliant upon the reader to infer some form of utopian hope from the dystopian text. For example, the ending of The Handmaid’s Tale reveals Offred stepping “into the darkness

20 within; or else the light.”27 Moylan suggests that dystopias are “hope-less” but for the majority of feminist dystopias, this is far from the truth.28 We see further ambiguity by the author’s insistence on the inclusion of what Baccolini refers to as the “persistence of hope.”29 Both texts contain various utopian spaces: in The Handmaid’s Tale we see the continuing struggle of Offred but also the potential for rebellion and escape, especially through the character of Moira. In The Stepford Wives, again we see Joanna Eberhart’s resistance and attempted escape from the clutches of the murderous Stepford husbands. These glimpses of utopia provide the reader with “a light in the dark” of enforced patriarchal society. The feminist dystopia therefore becomes an amalgamation of dystopia, utopia and feminist themes with the potentiality of hope (as per figure 1 below).

Figure 1

The persistence of hope is more than evident in the critical dystopian texts resistance to closure. The open ending of The Handmaid’s Tale leaves scope for potential utopian hope. The reader is left to ponder the fate of the protagonist and the addition of the Historical Notes does not result in complete resolution. Despite the seemingly definite ending of The Stepford Wives, we still remain optimistic as to the fate of the other potential automated “wives”. Surely Ruthanne Hendry will not succumb to the brutality of the Stepford regime? The feminist dystopia leaves the reader with the impression

27 Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale, op.cit, p.307 28 Moylan, Tom, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia, Oxford: Westview Press, 2000, p.137 29 Baccolini, Raffaella, ‘The Persistence of Hope in Dystopian Science Fiction’, PMLA, Volume 119 Issue 3, 2004, pp.518-521

21 that a possible harsh patriarchal future could be conquered by an ardent female population.

2.4 Dystopian literary adaptations The relevance of genre becomes more apparent when considering filmic adaptations of dystopian texts. Textually and cinematically, the relationship between dystopia and science-fiction has always been complex. Dystopia has always been marginalised and viewed as the critical strand of science- fiction writing and, therefore, when transferred to screen there are certain expectations of the end product. The director yields to the film industry’s conventions of the stereotypical science-fiction film with the utilisation of the advancement of cinematic technology and special effects to apparently visualise the future presented by the text. Filmic adaptations have to contend with various other issues, which are amplified with the dystopian nature of the text: • The difference in historical contexts from the precursor text to the era of release, especially in terms of the dystopian genre due to the provision of future projections of “current” society together with reflections on past and present • The need for consideration of theme and narrative relevance to the contemporary audience • Audience awareness, not necessarily of the precursor text, but society as a whole as dystopias are an engagement with the present as much as the future • Wider audience appeal and expectation, as stated above, the increasing interest in computer generated images/effects within the futuristic film.30 The adaptation of the dystopian text, therefore, becomes a compromise of adhesion to cinematic conventions, undoubtedly a fidelity to the precursor text and commitment to the dystopian genre. The various sub-genres of the dystopia become apparent, or in some cases are established, when the text is transferred to the screen. The critical lens of dystopian cinema results in the amplification of feminist issues within a contemporary context. The

30 Further issues will be discussed in Chapter Three: Adaptation as Process, p.67

22 adaptations can be viewed as historical products of feminism and attitudes towards feminism throughout the period of the women’s liberation movement. Again the marginality of the feminist dystopia is evident when considering it within the wider genre alongside totalitarian dystopias (1984); cyberpunk (Bladerunner); apocalyptic (The Road) and voyaging through space/time (The Time Machine).31

Released in a decade alongside a plethora of blockbuster science-fiction films, such as Star Wars Trilogy (1977 onwards) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and dystopian adaptations, such as A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Logan’s Run (1976), Forbes’s 1975 adaptation of The Stepford Wives has resulted in various critical debates as to the exact genre of the film. Williams states that the adaptation is more aligned to the gothic genre than to science-fiction as “the gothic implies the horrors of patriarchal control over women’s minds and bodies at the same time veils a proto-feminist celebration of female survival and even accomplishment.”32 The film exhibits various aspects of the gothic horror film as it portrays the typical mise-en-scene of the traditional Hollywood horror film, especially with the austere landscape and the inclusion of the Victorian gothic mansion as the home of the Stepford Men’s Association. Schickel emphasises the distinct difference apparent between director and screenwriter concerning genre: “Forbes labored to direct a serious horror film while writer Goldman penned a satire.”33

In terms of the feminist genre, the film received contradictory criticisms as it was seen as both anti-male and anti-feminist. As one critic stated: “he was indeed saying something about gender relations in the early seventies (even if no-one could quite figure out what that something was).”34 Forbesʼs combination of both horror and satire conveys the dissent at the treatment of women in 1970s society. He provides ridicule to the male backlash regarding

31 See Appendix One: Dystopian Sub-genres, p.97 32 Williams, Anne, op.cit., p.88 33 Schickel in Helford, Elyce Rae, ‘The Stepford Wives and the Gaze: Envisioning Feminism in 1975’, Feminist Media Studies, Volume 6 Issue 2, 2006, p.152 34 Maio, Kathi, ‘The Town Hollywood Couldn’t Forget’, Fantasy & Science Fiction, October/November 2004, p.116

23 the feminist movement. David Bartholomew summarised the importance of ideology and the insignificance of genre in his review of the adaptation:

THE STEPFORD WIVES is probably the only viable, intelligently conceived movie about women and their future made in the past decade…(it) is one of the select few genre films more important for its ideas than its genre excitements.35

However, many within the feminist movement regard the adaptation as being overly satirical and too futuristic. Silver states that “The fact the film is science-fiction…enables the resistant viewer to conclude that the oppression of women within the home is simply fantasy.”36 Even Friedan herself walked out of the film screening outraged describing it as a “rip off of the women’s movement.”37 The adaptation evidently can be situated within the feminist dystopian genre as throughout the film, we can draw parallels with the second-wave feminist movement as Forbes concentrates upon the apparent idyllic nature of the nuclear family, the oppression of the female into domestic roles and the artificiality of the female, quite literally in the transformation into automatons.

As with Forbes’s adaptation, Frank Oz’s 2004 adaptation of The Stepford Wives appears to be a combination of various genres. The film is vaguely dystopic due to the concentration on futuristic elements, such as the advancement of technology with the production and implantation of microchips in the human mind, but tends towards the comedic. The feminist themes evident within Levin’s original text are usurped by comical moments between characters and expansive lavish sets. It appears that Oz concentrates on the contemporary definition of a “Stepford Wife” as authoritative, domineering female rather than submissive housewife (as portrayed in the 1975 adaptation) with the inclusion of a female perpetrator,

35 Bartholomew, David, ‘The Stepford Wives’, Cinefantastique, Issue 4, Summer 1975, p.41 36 Silver, Anna Krugovoy, ‘The Cyborg Mystique: The Stepford Wives and Second Wave Feminism’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Volume 30 Issue 1/2, 2002, p.63 37 Helford, Elyce Rae, “It’s a Rip-Off of the Women’s Movement”: Second-Wave Feminism and The Stepford Wives in Inness, Sherrie A. (ed.), Disco Divas: Women and Popular Culture in the 1970s, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003, p.24

24 Claire Wellington. The film appears as a hypertext as it subsumes elements of both previous adaptation and precursor text.38 Oz seemingly attempts to force the text into the historical context of the 2000s post-feminist era resulting in an adaptation, which does not quite fulfil either the ideology of the precursor text or the progression of the feminist movement.

The adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale can be seen as virtually faithful to Atwood’s original text in terms of plot, therefore, placing it within the confines of the dystopian genre. Schlöndorff retains the host of characters available within the precursor text and presents them against a bleak, suburban American landscape. Criticism has been levelled at whether the influence of Harold Pinter, as screenwriter, resulted in the novel becoming “trite, controversial melodrama with an unconvincing finale in which Offred heroically kills the Commander and escapes the system.”39 Melodramatic elements are certainly evident within the adaptation and to an extent overshadow the interiority of character and feminist ideology evident within the text. The adaptation was filmed during the late 1980s and was released in 1990 yet apparently lacks any historical grounding in the era in terms of the feminist movement during the period or indeed the progression of the status of the female, considering the futuristic nature of the text. In terms of genre, Schlöndorff’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale still maintains a dystopian nature due to its bleak, futuristic landscape but how the director chooses to (re)present women and explore feminist ideologies and issues is worthy of further investigation.

38 Hypertext defined by Genette as the relation between a text and preceding “hypotext”. 39 Mohr, Dunja M., op.cit., p.229

25 3. (Re)presentation of Women

Feminist critics, such as Kate Millet in her text Sexual Politics (1970), have criticised the power relationships and traditional sex roles inherent within literature and the media, calling for a more positive representation of women together with greater attention to women’s issues.40 The female character is not only portrayed negatively (in relation to status and role) but is frequently neglected in favour of the male character in terms of centrality to the film. It is only within the last few decades that the film industry, in particular the science-fiction genre, has sought to include strong female protagonists such as Ripley in Alien (1979) and Trinity in The Matrix (1999). Despite the introduction of a more positive female character, the representation of the female on film is still subject to the patriarchal dominance of both the film industry and society as a whole. Women are seemingly constrained to the traditional feminine roles of wife and mother and are provided with stereotypical feminine personality traits, such as passivity and hyper-emotion.

Dystopian films should provide a reflection on both past and present with a view to revealing the potential future as an ill-considered product of a prior society. Within this context, the feminist dystopian adaptation should reveal unresolved issues with gender discussions and feminist discourse and allow the viewer to witness the characterisation of the female as projected into a future landscape. This chapter will seek to establish how women are represented on screen within the adaptations of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Stepford Wives in relation to the character evident within the precursor texts, historical context at the time of film release and whether there is evidence to suggest that there are similarities between the texts when conveying the female character from text to screen.

3.1 The male and female “gaze” It is impossible to critically evaluate the adaptations of both The Handmaid’s Tale and The Stepford Wives without considering the influence of gender perspective. Laura Mulvey in her seminal work, Visual Pleasure and

40 Millett, Kate, Sexual Politics, University of Illinois Press, 2000

26 Narrative Cinema, published in 1975 (notably the same year of release of Forbes’s adaptation of The Stepford Wives) provides a psychoanalytical approach to the reading of film. Mulvey postulates that the female is objectified within the cinema through what can be termed the male “gaze”. Woman is constructed as an object of desire by the patriarchal film industry – the female is both displayed by the director and looked upon by the audience. As Mulvey states:

Women [then] stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.41

She extends her theory with the ideology of three “gazes” evident within the cinema: that of the camera, audience and the characters within the film. In terms of the literary adaptation, the “gaze” becomes complex. We witness the female character endure several levels of objectification: firstly through the textual narrative (author), then the screenplay (screenwriter), then transferral to the screen (both director and cast) and finally the viewing (audience). As Mulvey states:

Transforming the indirect, more abstract and generalized voyeurism of reading into the physically prompt voyeurism of watching, the movie invites the viewer to the very pleasures of looking reproved by the novel.42

The audience bears witness to the cinematic illusion of reality via the (re)presentation of characters from the text to the screen through the voyeuristic tendencies of the cinema. The objectification of the female on screen through the “gaze” situates women within the uncomfortable position of “other”. The concept of the “otherness” of the female, first conceived by Simone de Beauvoir in her text The Second Sex (1949), presents a duality of representation with the female regarded as being and object – “other” rather than subject – “self”. Through the use of “other”, the division of the sexes is

41 Mulvey, Laura, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Penley Constance (ed.), Feminism and Film Theory, London: Routledge, 1988, p.58 42 Mulvey, Laura, op.cit., p.58

27 more than apparent with the female being subjugated by the patriarchal order. As de Beauvoir states of the female in relation to the male: “she is the Other in a totality of which the two components are necessary to one another.”43 De Beauvoir not only highlights the inferior status of the female but also the necessity for opposite sexes to form relationships, albeit the emphasis being on the “master-slave” relationship.44

Both The Handmaid’s Tale and The Stepford Wives provide evidence of the “otherness” of the female with the delineation of the female characters as inferior to the male in terms of status and role. The concept of the “other” is intensified on screen through the use of visual imagery as attention is drawn not only to the female character, both physicality and personality, but also to the relationships with male characters. In scenes such as the meeting of the men’s association at the Eberhart household in Forbes’s 1975 adaptation, it is more than evident that the men are there purely to “gaze” at Joanna and assess her worth as potential robotic Stepford wife. Similarly in Schlöndorff’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, the women within Jezebels are observed (and man-handled) for entertainment purposes. This ideology together with the gender bias contained within the film industry leads to the potential presentation of women that are “man-made.”

3.2 Giving the female role a “name” The post-modern concern regarding the “Other” witnessed in Mulvey’s work and feminist ideologies begins with the search for and creation of the identity of the female. This is more than evident with the designation of names to both the collective and individual within The Handmaid’s Tale and The Stepford Wives. The collective identity is somewhat contradictory as it suggests that the women are united against a common cause but in terms of the texts in question the women are deprived of any individuality and there is an

43 de Beauvoir, Simone, The Second Sex, London: David Campbell Publishers Ltd., 1993, p.xliv 44 The “master-slave” relationship has particular relevance to the presentation of women within the dystopian genre. Kray suggests that one of the three types of female evident within the genre is that of the slave (discussed in section 3.3 The status of the female, p.30

28 enforcement of segregation under the patriarchal regime. In The Handmaid’s Tale, women are actively discouraged from fraternising with both men and women. Similarly, The Stepford Wives reveals the male objection to the formation of women’s groups. Just as Offred occupies herself by playing with language/words throughout The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood invites the reader to speculate as to the meaning of “handmaid”.45 Whilst having the obvious biblical connotations the term also suggests the artificial nature of society and female characters in particular – “hand-made” - and the slave like nature of the fertile female’s relationship with male society.46 This is turn bears reference to the term “man-made” and the commencement of mass production or reproduction in terms of the society of Gilead. Similarly, Levin’s use of “Stepford wives”, a term that has become synonymous within contemporary society, reinforces both the collective nature of the women and their status within society. Both the terms “maid” and “wife” are also blatant domestic references to the status of women. The generic terminology used to describe women in both texts is obviously significant to the text as a whole and is therefore, retained by the respective directors in the titling of their adaptations.47

A main theme of the dystopia is the removal of individuality in order to exert authoritarian control. On a basic level, the state suppresses the population through the elimination of names, for example, in both Zamyatin’s We and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four the populace is numbered.48 In The Handmaid’s Tale, the handmaids are assigned patronymic names, for example, Of-Fred, as they are regarded as the possession of both the

45 Speculation also arises from the use of the word “tale”. It can be argued that Atwood is again playing with words and is inferring “tail”. Tail as being relevant to gender in terms of appendage. 46 Handmaid as a reference to the Old Testament – Rachel bearing children for Jacob). 47 The director may also wish to acknowledge the precursor text by retaining the title. Forbes in his 1975 adaptation of The Stepford Wives pays homage to Levin by crediting the original text in the opening titles. 48 The numbering within We is potentially related to the personal experiences of Zamyatin, including cultural and literary references. It is interesting to note that the male characters “names” begin with a consonant and the female characters with a vowel. The title of Zamyatin’s novel in itself signifies the collectivisation of the population of “One State”.

29 Commander and State. The female individual loses all sense of identity and is not only part of the collective but a reproductive commodity. We discover through the “Historical Notes” that the character is actually named by the male academics who locate Offred’s tape recordings, therefore, enforcing the patronymic nature of the name. Such naming can be regarded as akin to the traditional marriage custom of the woman taking her husband’s surname. Other suggestions for the use of Offred also have negative connotations, such as “off-red” or “offered”. Atwood appears reluctant to name any of the peripheral characters, such as Offred’s mother and daughter, possibly in an attempt to maintain the focus upon the main characters but also to represent the female population as a whole rather than as numerous individuals.

Atwood again invites the reader to conjecture as to the name of her protagonist. The novel becomes interactive as the reader attempts to search for the genuine name of the protagonist within the narrative. This air of mystery is lost within the adaptation as Schlöndorff provides the central character with a name and therefore, an identity: Offred becomes “Kate”. This results in the redundancy of certain sections of the novel as the protagonist no longer has to question her identity:

My name isn’t Offred, I have another name, which nobody uses now because it’s forbidden. I tell myself it doesn’t matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter. I keep the knowledge of this name like something hidden, some treasure I’ll come back to dig up one day.49

Understandably, the director names the protagonist in order to exude a certain familiarity for the audience within a futuristic film containing potentially demanding themes. However, Schlöndorff softens the blow of the possessive nature of the society of Gilead and presents the audience with a definite identity for the protagonist.

In contrast to The Handmaid’s Tale, Levin adopts the traditional naming of characters within The Stepford Wives. There is nothing out of the ordinary to suggest a futuristic society in which the individual has succumbed to the

49 Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale, op.cit., p.94

30 oppression of the state. Forbes’s adaptation in 1975 simply transfers the characters from page to screen. It is only with Oz’s adaptation in 2004 that we see a change in both actual characters and character names. There is the obvious addition of central characters, such as Claire and Mike Wellington (who can be seen as replacements for the Van Sants) and Roger and Jerry (the token homosexual couple) through which Oz attempts to provide contemporary enlightenment. However, the most significant change can be noted in the change of surname of Joanna Eberhart’s husband, no longer is he Walter Eberhart but becomes Walter Kresby. Oz utilises the difference in surnames to emphasise the independence of the female within millennial society – a small step towards the recognition of the female as an individual and the progress within the feminist movement.

3.3 The status of the female The inference of a decline (The Handmaid’s Tale) or a potential positive transformation (The Stepford Wives, 2004) in the status of the female through the simplicity of characters names is merely the beginning of the representation of women from text to screen. The dystopian genre itself presents a standard set of atypical female characters.50 Kray postulates that there are three possible types of women: (1) slaves, possibly in chains, illiterate, ignorant, barefoot, pregnant, and blank-eyed with misery, because nobody gives them any education or health care – and do not even think about fun; (2) a valiant few struggling to survive in an unpleasant world; or (3) arrogant fools trying to govern men and creating instead a totalitarian tyranny that manipulates and dehumanises men.51

Both The Handmaid’s Tale and The Stepford Wives encapsulate propositions one and two above as we see the female presented as both slave to the totalitarian regime and potential survivor/escapee. The “chains” are virtual in terms of both texts with the female being “tied” by the constraints of the patriarch. However, pregnancy is more than evident within The Handmaid’s Tale as reproduction is enforced by the state and the blank-eyed female

50 Appendix Three: Character Mapping (p.100) provides a correlation of the characters evident within each text. 51 Kray, Susan, ‘The Things Women Don’t Say’, in Westfahl, Gary and Slusser, George Edgar (eds.), Science Fiction, Canonization, Marginalization, and the Academy, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., 2002, p.43

31 female appears literally in The Stepford Wives as we are presented with Joanna as automaton by Forbes towards the end of his adaptation (see figure 2). The ideology of the female as slave or survivor is inextricably linked to the masculinity of the dystopian genre, with Figure 2 both male and female authors highlighting the subjugation of the female whereas Kray’s third proposition is more aligned to the feminist utopia whereby the creation of a matriarchal regime has similar consequences to the entirety of society.

If we take into consideration Kray’s reference to illiteracy, both texts in question provide further evidence of the degradation of the status of the female through the deficiency of literature. A predominant theme throughout the dystopian genre is state enforced illiteracy through the removal of all printed material. Both Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty Four and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 reveal the state’s disregard of literature especially in relation to the female population. In what can be considered the most provocative scene of Truffaut’s adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 (1966) we see an aged woman assuming the role of protector of literature as her books are deliberately set alight around her (see Figure 3 figure 3). The Handmaid’s Tale reveals the intent of the protagonist to maintain a connection with literature and language through her continual playing with words. Schlöndorff makes very little reference this within the adaptation (we only see a glimpse of women’s magazines during one of Kate’s visits to the Commander) but the lack of evidence of literature in itself reveals the nature of the regime. Whilst the removal of literature is not made apparent in The Stepford Wives, there is a certain emphasis on the visual rather than the literal. We see Joanna as photographer in both Levin’s original text and Forbes’s adaptation. In Oz’s adaptation, literature appears

32 but only at the basest of levels. The appearance of “thee most important book any of us will ever read”, the “provocative and inspiring” “Heritage Hills Special Edition Golden Deluxe Treasury of Christmas Keepsakes and Collectables” at the Stepford book club emphasises the shallowness of Stepford’s females with their sole focus in life as being “tied” to the domesticity of the suburban home.

The status of the female within the dystopian genre is more often than not confined to the arena of domesticity as we see women suppressed by the state into traditionally feminine roles: those of bearers of children (“handmaids”) and familial nurturers (“wives” and mothers). A thought echoed within The Feminist Mystique: Cooking, cleaning and other domestic chores became, according to Friedan, the occupation of a housewife, but also a religion of sorts, since they were seen as fulfilment of women’s natural roles and inner drives, as defined by their biological capacity to reproduce.52

Domesticity becomes the sole (pre)occupation of the female character as employment for women is abolished for the greater good of the state. Within The Handmaid’s Tale the female right to employment is forcibly removed by the state of Gilead and women are segregated into more meaningful positions within society according to their ability to reproduce.53 Similarly in The Stepford Wives we see Joanna relinquish her position of “avid shutterbug” towards the end of the text as she succumbs to the desires of the men of Stepford.54 The female is thus contained through the removal of any form of progressive status.

The status of the female presented in adaptations of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Stepford Wives needs to be considered in relation to the historical context of the respective adaptation. Forbes’s 1975 adaptation of The

52 Paasonen, Susanna, ‘Best Wives Are Artefacts? Popular Cybernetics and Robot Women in the 1970s’ in Anu Koivunen and Susanna Paasonen (eds.), Conference proceedings for affective encounters: rethinking embodiment in feminist media studies, University of Turku, School of Art, Literature and Music, Series A, No 49, 2001, pp. 191-192 53 See Appendix Four: The Handmaid’s Tale Hierarchy of Women, p.101 54 Levin, Ira, op.cit., p.18

33 Stepford Wives, chronologically the first of the three adaptations to be considered, was released during the height of the second-wave feminist movement. The director is faithful to the precursor and lifts the characterisation of the female directly from Levin’s text. We are presented with the contrasting characters of Stepford’s newest inhabitant, Joanna Eberhart, the recently befriended Bobbie Markowe and the existing female residents who appear as “actresses in commercials, pleased with detergents and floor wax, with cleaners, shampoos, and deodarants. Pretty actresses, big in the bosom but small in the talent, playing suburban housewives unconvincingly, too nicey-nice to be real.”55 Stepford women were once career women but have been reduced to the domestic realm by the underhanded actions of their husbands. Those who are gainfully employed are restricted to the traditional female roles, such as gardening and baking (nurturing being their only vocation in life). We witness the transformation, or rather murder, of firstly Charmaine, then Bobbie and then finally Joanna from feminist, career orientated females to complicit housewives eager to satisfy their husband’s every whim. As Lim states: “The Stepford wives…are executed for their lack of fit with a conception of femininity against which they have been secretly weighed by their husbands, only to be found wanting.”56 Women are expected to comply with the male notion of femininity – that of domestic goddess as expressed by Friedan within The Feminine Mystique. Forbes utilises darkened sets and cage-like scenery throughout the adaptation to ensure that the viewer obtains a sense of the restricted movement of the women of Stepford and a sense of ominous foreboding as to the fate of the women.

Schlöndorff chooses to begin his adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale with the events immediately prior to the protagonist’s capture by the forces of Gilead, revealing Kate’s fate from the onset. The adaptation commences with a panoramic landscape with the family driving towards their potential freedom. We then see the shooting of Luke (Kate’s husband), the capture of Kate and

55 Levin, Ira, op.cit., p.40 56 Lim, Bliss, Cua, ‘Serial Time: Bluebeard in Stepford’ in Stam, Robert and Raengo, Alessandra (eds.), Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2005, p.173

34 their abandoned daughter. Subsequent scenes further expose the harsh reality of the regime as we see women being transported in articulated vehicles that previously contained livestock and literally being shepherded by the Aunts via the use of cattle prods. Women are viewed as commodities and separated into those who are “useful” to society and those who are unable to reproduce. As Moira eloquently states: “They don’t send you to the colonies when your ovaries are jumping.” Schlöndorff reveals the isolation of the female rather than remaining faithful to Atwood’s beginning whereby we are presented with a sense of camaraderie with the Handmaid’s whispering to each other within the Red Centre. By revealing such isolation, Schlöndorff encapsulates the female loss of identity, employment, financial means, and denial of property ownership at the hands of society, all of which are expressed by Atwood within the text.

The women of Gilead are segregated into specific roles by the patriarchal regime by the assignment of roles according to their class, race and sexual orientation. Most importantly women are reduced to their biological role and their ability to reproduce - the handmaid’s are seen as mere “two-legged wombs”.57 Schlöndorff conveys the hierarchy of the women through his vibrant use of colour for female attire against the dull uniforms of the male characters and the muted tones of the dystopian landscape. The contrasting reds of the handmaids against the blues of the Commander’s wives and the green of the Marthas (domestic servants), for example, highlights not only the social standing of the women but also the nature of their roles (see figure 4).58 The red of the handmaids attire can be viewed as symbolic blood of menstruation, and therefore, a link Figure 4 to childbirth. The blue of the Commander’s wives reveals the conservative nature of their characters. Atwood attempts to reveal that through different

57 Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale, op.cit., p.146 58 A synopsis of the hierarchy of women is available in Appendix Four, p.101

35 female rankings, women can no longer be workers, mothers or wives but must assimilate into their deemed state category.

Atwood alludes to the fact that rather than the feminist movement providing progression for the status of women throughout the 1980s (the text being published in 1985), it has resulted in a deterioration of the female role that could potentially be subject to further degradation in the future. As Atwood states a year after the release of the adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale in 1991: Women are socialized to please, to assuage pain, to give blood till they drop, to conciliate, to be selfless, to be helpful, to be Jesus Christ since men have given up on that role, to be perfect, and that load of luggage is still with us.59

Schlöndorff attempts to remain faithful to the text with the inclusion of the colourful garments of the various strata of women but does not really place the adaptation within the historical context of the 1980s and beyond. The status of the female is, to an extent, too regimented and the contrast between the female status and femininity is negated. For example, Atwood’s extensive use of floral imagery throughout the text as a signifier of the feminine is reduced to minor scenes of Serena Joy tending to her garden. We are no longer presented with alternatives to the harsh reality of the dystopian future as postulated by Atwood. There is no “freedom to” for the women of Gilead, only an existence that is enforced by the state.

In contrast to this, Oz’s adaptation of The Stepford Wives in 2004 presents the audience with a supposedly progressive view of the status of the female. The adaptation commences with a variety of 1950s housewife imagery, revealing woman as domestic goddess, wife and mother. We also see the revelation of technological advancement regarding household appliances which enable the housewife to become more efficient within the home. Juxtaposed against the background of the male-designated utopian female, Oz reveals the career driven woman of the millennium, Joanna Eberhart. This

59 Atwood, Margaret (quote from interview), ‘If You Can’t Say Something Nice, Don’t Say Anything At All’, in Glalt, George (ed.), The Thinking Heart: Best Canadian Essays, Ontario: Quarry Press, 1991, p.20

36 presentation is short-lived as the audience bears witness to the protagonist’s decline as she suffers a nervous breakdown following the demise of her recent innovative television programme “I can do better”.60 Through this Oz insinuates that women should not have such high-powered, traditionally male- dominated roles. The power shift from men to women is highlighted as a failure and at the end of the adaptation, we see Joanna as the perfect female, managing to combine both a career and a family. As Winterson states of the adaptation: You could [also] argue that these alpha females, all re-programmed from successful bitches and bores into lovely wives who do dresses and dusting, hide the fact that after 30 years of apparent equality, the majority of women are still low-paid and lacking in opportunities. Few women chair companies. The original Stepford dream, or nightmare, where women rule the world, is a long way off.61

Oz’s parody of the post-feminist world merely serves as a means of negating the progress of the feminist movement by the presentation of the compliant female – a role that both Friedan and Levin questioned within their respective texts three decades earlier.

3.4 (Re)presentation of individual female roles Further examination of the differing presentations of female status conveyed by both text and adaptation, unveils a commonality with regards to the establishment of stereotypical individual roles and personal attributes within the collective female group. The central character within the dystopian genre is more often than not male due to the masculinised nature of the genre. For example, D-503 in We, Winston Smith in Nineteen-Eighty Four and Bernard Marx in Brave New World. The male is presented as ineffectual against the power of the regime but yet there remains a sense of his masculinity and prowess of his gender. There is a particular difficulty for the author in presenting a female protagonist due to the constraints and expectations of the

60 “I can do better” involves happily married couples being placed on a remote island for one week with professional prostitutes of the respective opposite sex in an effort to discover if they will commit adultery. The ironic end result of the show is that the wife, Barbara, decides to remain with “bodybuilder and male escort Tonkiro” rather than return to her husband, Hank. 61 Winterson, Jeanette, ‘Living Dolls’, The Guardian (online), Monday 19 July 2004, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/jul/19/gender.uk

37 dystopian genre. Rather than present a linearity of character, as can be seen within the dystopian male protagonist, the author conveys individual females who are complex and have a variety of supposed “roles”.

The feminist dystopian genre provides an exposé of gender differences through the establishment of a spectrum of female characters who epitomise the stereotypical roles of women within society. For example, as Raschke states of The Handmaid’s Tale: “Gilead, neatly dividing the mother from the whore, attempts to create in each of the classes of women a fixed identity that will elicit no surprises – no monster in the house.”62 The “monster”, however, appears within the adaptation. Difficulties within the presentation of women are multiplied when the precursor text encounters standardisation of the film industry through the glare of the directors’ “gaze” and audience expectation in terms of the reinforcement of traditional female roles and attributes. The following section will provide an analysis of the key characters roles, namely the protagonist, the matriarch, the subversive/feminist female, and feminine attributes within each novel and how each respective director chooses to reveal them within the adaptation.

3.4.1 The protagonist Within any text or film, the narrative surrounds the thoughts and movements of the protagonist. However, within the dystopian text/film greater emphasis needs to be placed upon the central character as the narrative is focused upon the journey through an alternative future world. The dystopian protagonist enables the possibility of hope via transformations in character throughout the text. If we consider all three adaptations within their historical context, it is interesting to note the similarities between the characters despite the different historical contexts: Joanna Eberhart (1975), Kate/Offred (1990) and Joanna Eberhart (2004) – approximately a fifteen year period between each adaptation, therefore, a change in the presentation of the female protagonist, especially within the adaptation, should be evident.

62 Raschke, Debrah, ‘Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: False Borders and Subtle Subversions’, LIT, Volume 6, 1995, p.259

38 The female protagonist within both The Handmaid’s Tale and The Stepford Wives encompasses a multitude of prescribed societal feminine roles. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood presents Offred as a reflective thirty-three year old struggling to survive in the patriarchal totalitarian regime of Gilead. Throughout the novel, Atwood proposes various past and present guises of the protagonist. Offred is revealed as mother, wife, adulteress (from her previous affair with Luke to her current affair with Nick), potential rebel, would-be-feminist and primarily as reproductive slave. The status of the protagonist as a “Handmaid” is reinforced at the very beginning of the novel with the Serena Joy stating that Offred is only within the Commander’s home for “employment” alone: “I want to see as little of you as possible, she said. I expect you feel the same way about me……As for my husband, she said, he’s just that. My husband. I want that to be perfectly clear. Till death do us part. It’s final.”63

Offred, as with all other Handmaids, is reduced to her biological role, that of “two legged womb[s]”.64 Throughout the remainder of the novel, the reader bears witness to Offred’s internal, emotional struggle with her self-awareness, her pact and the role she is forced to play by society.

The multidimensional characterisation of the protagonist allows the reader to empathise with Offred regardless of the gender of the reader. As Staels states: Though the personal voice and perception (mind-style) of a female protagonist are at the centre of the tale, the language spoken from within the margin is not necessarily ‘woman’s language’, but the discourse of a socially marginalized individual.65

However, within his adaptation, Schlöndorff negates the narrator completely and becomes more concerned with measurable facts rather than emotions. Offred’s (Kate) story is dismissed, just as Professor Pieixoto is more concerned with the identity and location of the Commander than the tale of the Handmaid within Atwood’s Historical Notes (which Schlöndorff also

63 Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale, op.cit., p.25-26 64 Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale, op.cit., p.146 65 Staels, Hilde, ‘Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: Resistance Through Narrating’, English Studies, Volume 5, 1995, pp.463

39 chooses to omit). The audience is provided with brief glimpses of Kate’s various roles: Kate as mother at the start of the adaptation and a few flashbacks to her child immediately after the family’s capture; Kate as lover through voyeuristic shots of Kate and Nick having sexual intercourse; Kate as whore as she visits “Jezebels” with the Commander; Kate as best-friend through her ongoing relationship with Moira and Kate as subversive as the ending reveals an ultimate rebellion against the regime with the murder of the Commander. The director does present the viewer with a marginalized individual, in terms of isolation by the state, but fails to concentrate on any of Kate’s roles fully due to an inability to reveal the interiority of her character through the visualization on screen. Figure 5 Offred’s (Kate) story becomes one that is both linear in narrative and character. Schlöndorff focuses on Offred as a romantic heroine in a bid to provide a more feminised protagonist for the audience and to add sensationalisation of character. The audience bears witness to the emotional predicament of Offred as she deliberates between the love of three men, her husband, Luke (situated in the past), the Commander (the enforced present) and Nick (her potential future). The director places emphasis on the connection between the romantic and the sexual nature of the protagonist as throughout the adaptation, we see Kate as sexual but only in relation to her three potential mates.

Similarly, Levin initially presents the protagonist within The Stepford Wives as a multifaceted woman. Levin exemplifies the difficulties faced by the 1970s female by conveying a woman who wants it all: a career woman contending with her familial responsibilities whilst appearing to be active within the women’s liberation movement. Joanna Eberhart is a young mother of two whose primary occupation, or rather preoccupation, is photography. As Dr. Fancher states of Joanna during one of her therapy sessions: she is “pulled two ways by conflicting demands, perhaps more strongly than she’s aware; the old conventions on the one hand, and the new conventions of the

40 liberated woman on the other.”66 A statement reminiscent of the “problem with no name” postulated by Friedan.67 Joanna is obviously discontented with her new life amongst the suburban housewives of Stepford and is only too ready to reveal her reluctance to submit Figure 6 to the desires of the Stepford husbands, especially when she befriends the subversive Bobbie (figure 6 reveals a contemplative Joanna alone). Her eventual submission to the will of male society appears towards the end with her transformation into female automaton and Stepford wife.

Forbes’s adaptation in 1975 can be viewed as faithful to the text in terms of the characterisation of Joanna on screen. As mentioned previously, the adaptation was released a mere three years after the novel’s publication date so the film remains contemporaneous in terms of the presentation of the female. The adaptation begins with a lone, contemplative Joanna surveying her empty apartment but with the next shot, we realise that she is a mother of two with a husband. The scene is set for the remainder of the film as we see Walter, the husband, reprimanding his wife for forgetting to collect the family dog from the apartment. Joanna is conveyed from the outset as neglectful of her family duties but juxtaposed against this, throughout the adaptation she is revealed as a caring and nurturing mother, looking after her children with them even becoming an integral part of her photography. Forbes reveals Joanna as a woman having her cake and eating it, or rather contraband “ring- dings” together with a drop of Walter’s scotch.

As with Kate in the adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, Joanna is presented as the all-encompassing female, attempting to satiate her own desires whilst attempting to maintain an understanding of the enforced dystopia of Stepford. Again, we see woman presented as sexual object but with Forbes lifting

66 Levin, Ira, op.cit., p.89 67 Friedan, Betty, op.cit

41 narrative directly from Levin’s novel to provide the audience with one of the simplest yet most chilling scenes within the adaptation. As Joanna tends to the Stepford men’s association demands for refreshments within her own kitchen, Dale Coba watches her from the door Figure 7 and comments: “I like to watch women doing little domestic chores.”68 (see figure 7). This particular scene provides the audience with several views of the female: Joanna within the domestic realm; as feminine via the wearing of a floor length evening dress (noticeably not wearing a bra); as slave to the needs of the male (notably Joanna is situated within the shot at the proverbial kitchen sink) and most importantly the ideology of the female being subject to the constant gaze of the male (as per Mulvey’s analysis).

Oz’s 2004 adaptation of The Stepford Wives should provide a contrast to Forbes’s 1975 adaptation due to the elapse of nearly three decades. Rather than remain faithful to Levin’s precursor text, Oz chooses to portray a supposedly contemporary, post-modern female protagonist. The opening scenes of the adaptation reveal Joanna Eberhart as obsessive wannabe “Manhattan career bitch” who has insufficient time for her husband or children. However, the remainder of the adaptation reveals a protagonist who conforms to the stereotypical role of good wife and mother despite escaping the clutches of the Wellingtons. Oz presents the female protagonist, and the women of the millennium as a whole, as an example of the negative influence of the radical feminist movement of the past (see figure 8). The film can be regarded as over-excessive, not just in terms of extravagant set and all star cast, but in terms of the installation of a protagonist who provides no equilibrium of character: Figure 8

68 Levin, Ira, op.cit., p.29

42 Joanna is firstly career obsessed, then suffers a complete nervous breakdown, then recovers to resolve that she needs to envelop herself in Stepford society and finally, redeems herself in the eyes of her husband by succumbing to his initial wishes, that of the happy family. In comparison to Kate within The Handmaid’s Tale or Joanna within Forbes’s 1975 adaptation, she is devoid of emotion and appears to want to fulfil the wishes of Claire Wellington in the creation of the “perfect woman”. She may have escaped automaton transformation and produced the documentary “Stepford: The Secret of the Suburbs” but the Joanna of 2004 appears as idealistic as the 1950s housewives who appeared within the imagery at the beginning of the adaptation.

3.4.2 Passivity of the protagonist The female protagonists within the texts in question not only embrace a multitude of stereotypical feminine roles but also are ascribed personal attributes that reveal their propensity to either submit or rebel against the patriarchal regime. The generic attribute of passivity, as has already been discussed regarding Joanna Eberhart in Oz’s 2004 adaptation of The Stepford Wives, is evident with the protagonist’s rebellious internal monologue but essentially external compliance to the regime. It appears that the only means of escaping the clutches of the patriarchal regime is to be rescued by the all- important male hero, regardless of the text’s feminist persuasions. Gender stereotypes are reaffirmed through the use of personal attributes throughout the dystopian text with the female succumbing to her emotional vulnerability and the male supplying, in the words of Offred, a “reconstruction” and potentially utopian future. As Czarniawska and Gustavsson state of 1960s science-fiction: The chaos was conquered only when the hero could embrace the woman he loved and promise her that everything will be alright from now on.69

The reader is subjected to a protagonist who essentially conforms to the dystopian situation and the stereotypical viewpoint of her sex.

69 Czarniawska, Barbara and Gustavsson, Eva, op.cit., p.666

43 In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood presents Offred as “a passive, non- confrontational anti-heroine”, the ordinary female subject to the manipulation of the patriarchy in order to fulfil the reproductive needs of the state.70 The role of handmaid is presented as a continuation of Offred’s past: she previously served others, such as her mother and Luke, rather than attending to her own desires. The beginning of the text reveals Offred as a weak and pathetic character as she continues to serve and be controlled by others within the bleak regime of Gilead. She attempts to become more confident and intolerant of the regime through her storytelling but constantly feels she must apologise for herself and her narrative: I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilized. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not happier, then at least more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia.71

She attempts to retain her self-preservation through playing with words but even this fragment of sanity is appropriated by the Commander and his insistence on playing Scrabble (a game that seems to elicit sexual connotations between the characters). As Hammer states, Atwood reveals “a vicious circle of passivity and helplessness – wherein passivity perpetuates impotence which in turn justifies and excuses passivity”.72 Ultimately, Offred undertakes the stereotypical female role of damsel in distress when she is supposedly liberated at the end of the text by her “Guardian”, Nick.

Schlöndorff provides a contradictory reading of Offred’s passivity within his adaptation. On the one hand, Kate (Offred) acts in accordance with Moira’s description of her as “a goddamn wimp” with her complacent attitude towards the harsh realities of the regime and her inability to defy the advances of the Commander. The director manages to sustain such passivity with the casting of Natasha Richardson as Kate, an actor with little big screen experience who actively amplifies Pinter’s script and presents the audience with a completely apathetic female protagonist. Yet on the other hand, Schlöndorff counteracts

70 Mohr, Dunja, op.cit., p.256 71 Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale, op.cit., p.279 72 Hammer, Stephanie Barbe, ‘The World as it will be? Female Satire and the Technology of Power in The Handmaid’s Tale’, Modern Language Studies, Volume 20 Issue 2, 1990, p.44

44 this passivity with views of Kate as leader of the female group. For example, she is asked to watch over the hysterical Janine within the Red Centre and abets Moira in her escape via the humiliation and capture of Aunt Lydia within the toilets (neither of which scenes appear within the novel). Kate’s submissiveness is completely reversed towards the end of the film with her cold-blooded assassination of the Commander, a thought that a flight of her imagination within the novel. The audience is therefore, confused as to the true character of the female protagonist as there are no revelations of thought in the evolution of Kate as murderer. Schlöndorff consigns the female character to the basest of levels with the negation of any understanding of forethought for the sake of the cinematic spectacular.

Levin’s approach within The Stepford Wives is to present the reader with a female protagonist who is essentially as passive as Offred within The Handmaid’s Tale but who does attempt to defend herself from the Stepford husbands. Joanna is at times confrontational and is able to articulate her own thoughts without male intervention. She appears from the beginning as a non-conformist, not wanting to succumb to the domestic bliss of Stepford: “As a matter of principle she wasn’t going to do any housework.”73 A woman who, along with the assistance of her newfound best friend, Bobbie Markowe, attempts to re-establish the long lost women’s club as the female equivalent of the “men’s association”. Despite all her good feminist intentions, Joanna forcibly surrenders to the men after a half-hearted escape and becomes another fatalistic Stepford wife.

As stated previously, in his 1975 adaptation, Forbes retains the feminine roles of the protagonist. We also see the director transfer the passivity of Joanna to the screen. Joanna appears as the apathetic, wannabe feminist, hardly radical in her attempt to rouse the female masses of Stepford and seemingly forced into persuading the “wives” by her extroverted friend, Bobbie. Forbes’s characterisation results in what Czarniawska and Gustavsson refer to as the “moronization” of Joanna.74 Joanna is essentially presented as submissive to

73 Levin, Ira, op.cit., p.11 74 Czarniawska, Barbara and Gustavsson, Eva, op.cit., p.670

45 her patriarchal surroundings. However, Forbes does provide brief glimpses of Joanna’s potential as a potent character. In a confrontational scene with Bobbie, she stabs her best friend in the stomach as she suspects her of being a robot (in the novel, it is Bobbie who turns the knife on Joanna), an unexpected repositioning of her character. She also blackmails Claude Axhelm as she only agrees to take part in his language project if he persuades the Stepford Wives to attend the women’s consciousness awareness group. As with The Handmaid’s Tale, the audience is presented with a complexity of character as the ending of the adaptation reveals Joanna yielding to the desires of her husband and the men’s association.

Despite the Joanna Eberhart of the 1975 adaptation being presented by Forbes as apathetic, she still provokes a certain amount of audience empathy to her turbulent situation. In contrast to this, Oz’s 2004 Joanna Eberhart is presented as listless and completely unsympathetic. First presented as obsessive career woman, then undergoing a complete nervous breakdown resulting in her institutionalisation, she swiftly goes from being an impassioned, independent female to being entirely dependent upon her husband.75 Joanna’s passivity is overwhelming as Oz portrays her as needy housewife who is reliant both upon friends and the men within her life. Even at the end of the adaptation, we are presented with a protagonist who is willing to compromise to meet the needs of her husband and make her marriage work. There is no evidence of the independent post-modern woman we see in other dystopian films of the time, such as the Matrix Trilogy (1999- 2003) and any progression within the feminist movement seems to be overlooked.

3.4.3 Mentality of the protagonist The passivity and emotional dependence of the female presented in both The Handmaid’s Tale and The Stepford Wives can be seen to correlate to the female mental state. The dystopian genre advocates self-loathing via thoughts embedded in the individual through the patriarchal regime. Women

75 A contributing factor is that Nicole Kidman’s performance as Joanna pales in comparison to that of Katherine Ross in the 1975 adaptation.

46 in particular fall prey to such a psychological assault and the text reveals the interchange between interiority and exteriority. Women frequently encounter traumatic situations that result in a downward spiral of mental state and questioning of whether their surroundings are real or part of their vivid imagination. For example, in The Handmaid’s Tale, the family’s escape across the border to Canada is thwarted and Offred loses both her husband and her daughter. She exhaustively questions herself and her life (both present and past) throughout the remainder of the novel as an attempt to maintain some semblance of rationality. As Offred states within the novel: Sanity is a valuable possession; I hoard it the way people once hoarded money. I save it, so I will have enough, when the time comes.76

Similarly, in The Stepford Wives, Joanna is subject to an involuntary relocation from her city home to the gated community of Stepford and constantly queries the nature of the inhabitants and her existence within that community.

In each respective adaptation, the director incorporates the mental state of the protagonist to a greater extent than that conveyed in the novel. In The Stepford Wives (1975), Joanna visits a psychiatrist on the enforced advice of her husband. Forbes echoes the resolution to the “woman question” of the 1960s and 1970s in that women needed to seek medical assistance for their supposed “ailment” (their dissatisfaction with the mundane nature of their domestic lives). Unlike the quick fix of tablets prescribed by the therapist in Levin’s novel, the psychiatrist of Forbes’s adaptation offers moral support. She advises Figure 9 Joanna to take her children and leave Stepford. There is an understanding between the two women – something unsaid (which Forbes does not explain) and the audience bears witness to an instance of genuine female camaraderie (see figure 9). Forbes neglects to include Joanna’s sense of humour regarding her state of mind. At one point in the novel she checks

76 Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale, op.cit., p.119

47 herself and states: “Oh come on girl, you’re getting nutty!”, revealing that she is extremely self-aware and her supposed insanity is the result of male supposition.77

Schlöndorff continues to focus on the mental state of the protagonist with the use of lingering shots of Kate pondering her past which results in the appearance of flashbacks to her husband lying dead in the snow or her lost daughter (see figure 10). We witness the unbalanced nature of her mind when she visits the living room at night with the sole purpose of purloining Serena Joy’s scissors to be used as a potential murder weapon. Within the same scene, Kate is discovered by Nick and the next moment, they indulge in a passionate embrace. Admittedly, Schlöndorff is unable to fully focus on the interiority of the protagonist due to the difficulties in conveying the first-person narrative to Figure 10 screen but yet provides an impression of the mental anguish faced by the women of Gilead. This is reinforced with scenes revolving around medication – a theme that is evident throughout the dystopian genre, for example, the use of “soma” within Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Medication is utilised within the Red Centre to both pacify and biologically assist the Handmaids.

Oz’s adaptation of The Stepford Wives does not adopt the subtle approach to mentality as observed in The Handmaid’s Tale or indeed Forbes’s adaptation. Instead he assigns the protagonist to a complete mental collapse at the beginning of the adaptation (following her dismissal from the patriarchal television company). The audience is subject to the spectacle of Joanna at her most vulnerable at an early stage Figure 11

77 Levin, Ira, op.cit., p.44

48 within the film. We see her go from black suited, career driven woman to dishevelled, night-gowned in-patient within an instant (see figure 11). Despite Joanna’s recovery, Oz ensures that her sanity (and status) is questioned throughout the remainder of the adaptation by both herself and those around her. For example, in an intimate one-to-one moment between Joanna and Walter, Joanna states: “But if I'm not the smartest and the best of the best and the most successful, then I don't know, who am I?”

Oz adequately summarises the contemplations of Friedan forty years after the publication of The Feminine Mystique revealing that the post-modern female has still not managed to discover a resolution to ”the problem with no name” and if anything is dealing with greater psychological traumas due to the stresses and demands of contemporary society.

3.4.4 The mother or matriarch One of the many roles incorporated into the presentation of the female protagonist in both The Handmaid’s Tale and The Stepford Wives is that of the mother. Atwood reminds the reader throughout The Handmaid’s Tale of the loss of Offred’s daughter through flashbacks and conversations with Serena Joy regarding the location of her daughter. Despite the lack of physical connection with her child, Offred appears to be nurturing and caring in her relations with other females, such as Janine and Moira. In The Stepford Wives, the position of Joanna as mother is evident from the beginning of the text with the mentioning of the family and children. The reader is constantly provided with descriptions of the family, various family outings and the babysitting of other people’s children. Juxtaposed against the vision of the nurturing female is the position of matriarch (pr patriarchal female). In both texts, respective authors present women who are only too willing to execute the patriarchal wishes of the state. The Handmaid’s Tale not only provides the reader with Serena Joy, one-time gospel singer and wife of the Commander, but also the Aunts, extreme advocates of the totalitarian regime through the training and brainwashing of the Handmaids. Similarly in The Stepford Wives, Levin presents the robotic matriarch, Carol Van Sant, domestic goddess who prefers to wax her floors than become involved in

49 feminist activity. As Joanna states: “Next to her…my mother is Kate Millet.”78 A further reference made by Levin to feminist critics writing at the height of the women’s liberation movement and an obvious emphasis on both the abnormality of the Stepford wives and their lack of interest in feminist issues.

In the adaptations in question, the respective director conveys the female as both mother and/or matriarch to varying extents. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the female as mother is revealed from the beginning of the film as Schlöndorff introduces the family unit with Kate, her husband and daughter in a car driving through the landscape.79 In the opening scenes, the audience encounters Kate’s anguish at the loss of her daughter during the family’s capture by the Gilead authorities (see figure 12) and then later within the adaptation, further distress is expressed when Kate is presented with a photograph of her daughter. Juxtaposed against this is the appearance of the matriarchal character in the guise of Serena Joy (see figure 13). Schlöndorff presents a

Figure 12 Figure 13 much younger, more powerful and brusque version of the Commander’s wife as described by Atwood in the precursor text (a limping elderly women ailed by arthritis). As Nick repeats to Kate following a conversation with Serena Joy: “Boss’s wife is real lady-like. She says I want you to fuck her, Nick, give her the works. I said yes mam. Anything you say, mam.” Serena Joy is firmly established as the second in command within the household but yet Schlöndorff also presents her as an advocate of the traditional role of women. In a number of scenes, she partakes in some form of female domestic activity, whether it be gardening or knitting. This is a direct transferral from Atwood’s

78 Levin, Ira, op.cit., p.9 79 It is interesting to note that the director initially places Kate as the driver of the car before her husband takes over the driving, reinforcing the ideology that women can perform traditionally masculine tasks.

50 novel were there are a plethora of references to the female and the garden and we also learn that Serena Joy’s previous role involved her making speeches “about the sanctity of the home, about how women should stay home.”80 The hardened matriarch’s desperation for a child is also evident.

Forbes again reveals the protagonist’s role as mother within the family unit at the start of his 1975 adaptation of The Stepford Wives. Within the opening scenes Joanna is viewed waiting in the family car with her children as her husband collects the neglected family canine. Forbes emphasises the view of the stereotypical nuclear American family throughout his adaptation through the use of scenes containing all family members, with Joanna at the centre, and the narrative alluding to the necessity for the family unit. For example, Walter states that the relocation to Stepford was “the best for the kids and best for you.” A particular poignant moment is a point of view shot through the Eberhart’s kitchen window in which we witness the entire family eating breakfast (see figure 14). Joanna’s role as mother is reaffirmed later in the adaptation when she returns to her home and cannot find her children. The subsequent scenes make for disturbing viewing as we see Joanna’s anguish at the loss of her children as she hears a voice calling “mommy” within the men’s association house. This not only reveals the intense connection between mother and child but also the extent to which the males are prepared to fulfil their ideas of domination and control of the female population of Stepford.

Figure 14 Figure 15 The position of matriarch within the adaptation is occupied by Carol Van Sant, an existing automated Stepford wife. In comparison to Serena Joy in The Handmaid’s Tale, Van Sant is a somewhat passive matriarch. She complies

80 Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale, op.cit., p.55

51 with her husband’s wishes, spends the majority of her time addressing domestic issues and refuses to become involved in the resurrection of a women’s awareness raising group. However, we discover that Van Sant was the president of the now defunct Stepford women’s group which provides the audience with a character who was once matriarchal but is now essentially submissive.

In contrast to Forbes’s adaptation, Oz’s 2004 adaptation of The Stepford Wives overlooks the role of mother. Following the family’s relocation to Stepford, we fleetingly observe the Eberhart-Kresby children within the new family home and then at the community fete. Oz concentrates on the role of the protagonist firstly as career-obsessed female and as the film progresses, he reveals Joanna as wife through continual dialogues between wife and husband. For example, Walter’s reprimand of Joanna regarding her reluctance to adapt to their new, perfect environment. Children are only observed or mentioned briefly. The focus of the adaptation becomes the matriarch as the audience is presented with the power-hungry Claire Wellington - the counterpart to the precursor text’s Carol Van Sant (see figure 16). Wellington represents the traditional view of women, the type abhorred by Friedan and her fellow feminist critics, that of the domestic goddess, wife and mother. She is revealed as leader of the wives, organiser of “Clairobics” sessions at the Stepford Day Spa, initiator of the women’s book club and at the end of the film we discover that Wellington is responsible for the transformation of the Stepford women into automatons. Oz utilises the characters of Joanna and Claire as symbols of the potential post-modern failures of a radical women’s Figure 16 movement. The demands of women, in terms of career and independency, have become so great within contemporary society that the end result is a reversion to traditional feminine roles at the behest of women themselves.

52 3.4.5 The subversive/feminist In opposition to the position of the matriarch, both The Handmaid’s Tale and The Stepford Wives present the subversive female as an integral character within the text. The subversive female adopts a rebellious attitude to patriarchal society and provides a discernible window into the contemporaneous feminist movement. Minor subversive elements can also be observed within the character of the protagonist as rebellion is apparent via internal monologue – an “otherness” within the female’s own psyche. If we are to class the texts in question as feminist dystopias, it is somewhat surprising that the subversive female plays such a residual role in comparison to the other female characters. Such a strong, rebellious character should be placed at the forefront of the genre as a means of extolling the virtues of the feminist movement. However, this depiction provides the reader with contrasting female characters – the introverted rebel (the protagonist) and the extroverted dissident (the subversive female). This is amplified with the establishment of a close relationship between protagonist and subversive which results in the forming of a potentially influential female grouping with the subversive coercing the protagonist into insurgence against patriarchal society.

In The Handmaid’s Tale, Moira is conveyed as the epitome of feminism and subversion. She reveals an ingenuity of character and is intent on retaining her individuality, especially her “gender treachery.”81 On several occasions she attempts to escape the regime using any possible means, from the attack on Aunt Lydia to her eventual residence at “Jezebels”. At one point, she utilises her female sexuality in exchange for her freedom by having sex with the Guardians. Through her reluctance to conform to the commands of the state, Moira serves as a heroine to the other women within the text. As Offred states: …Moira was our fantasy. We hugged her to us, she was with us in secret, a giggle; she was the lava beneath the crust of daily life.82

81 “Gender treachery” as state terminology for homosexuality. Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale, op.cit., p.53 82 Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale, op.cit., p.143

53 Her deviant character serves as an inspiration to the other Handmaids and is emblematic of potential hope within the bleak world of Gilead. Schlöndorff recognises the cinematic potential of Moira and more than replicates her character on screen. The audience is presented with an argumentative, unassuming lesbian who is both verbally and visually anarchic. Moira (Elizabeth McGovern) commands every multi-charactered scene, especially in the Jezebels scene whereby she appears in a provocative version of the Handmaid’s attire (see figure 17). In the adaptation, she is the soul representative for the feminist Figure 17 movement as Schlöndorff omits virtually all references to the only authentic feminist within the novel, Offred’s mother (except for a brief glimpse of Offred’s mother on a documentary screened within the Red Centre). Moira offers resistance to both past and present regimes through her sexuality and wanton personality.

Atwood also incorporates subversion, but to a lesser extent, within the protagonist, Offred. Offred’s rebellion is predominantly maintained inwardly through her recollections of the past and through her minor association with the Underground Femaleroad (assisted by Ofglen). However, she uses her feminine wiles to her advantage, for example, the gaining of hand lotion from the Commander, and frequently exerts her sexual prowess as a female. As Malak states:

Her double-crossing of the Commander and his Wife, her choice to hazard an affair with Nick, and her association with the underground network, all point to the shift from helpless victim to being a sly, subversive survivor.83

Schlöndorff attempts to utilise this darker side to the protagonist within his adaptation. For example, he includes a bathroom scene in which Kate assists with Moira’s escape by wielding a cattle prod at the stripped and bound Aunt

83 Malak, Amin, ‘Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and the Dystopian Tradition’, Canadian Literature Quarterly, Issue 112, Spring 1987, p.13

54 Lydia (see figure 18).84 This not only emphasises the nature of the relationship between Kate and Moira, with Moira being the revered female, but we see the potential of Kate as rebel. The final subversion being the murder of the Commander and her assisted escape from Gilead. Despite the

Figure 18 Figure 19 blatant passivity of Kate, Schlöndorff reveals the character’s use of sexual power via, not only the sensationalised sexual encounters with Nick, but through the subtle use of eye contact. For example, the director includes several point of view shots of Kate seducing Nick with her gaze (see figure 19). Here, consideration must be given to the fact that the director is revealing Kate’s “gaze” via the rear view mirror, which ultimately means that Kate is the subject of Nick’s “gaze”, therefore, potentially negating the sexual power of the female.

The subversive females within The Stepford Wives are again limited to the overtly subversive, that of the character of Bobbie, and potential rebellious persuasions of the protagonist, Joanna. As with The Handmaid’s Tale, Levin presents the subversive female as closest ally of the protagonist but the contrast between the two characters is somewhat diminished. Both Bobbie and Joanna commence their journey within Stepford as progressive women who are supporters of the feminist movement (with Bobbie as the more ardent supporter) and attempt to resist the desires of the patriarchs. Forbes, in his 1975 adaptation, retains the feminist attitudes of both characters with few alterations to characterisation or narrative. The adaptation actually reveals a more subversive Joanna who, accompanied by Bobbie, visits her ex-

84 This particular scene is included within Atwood’s text but there is an uncertainty as to whether it actually occurred due to the narrator’s unreliable “reconstruction” of events.

55 boyfriend, Raymond Chandler, to ask for his assistance in determining whether “there is something in the water” causing the women of Stepford to behave like automated domestic goddesses (a scene which does not appear within Levin’s novel). The feminist persuasions of both Bobbie and Joanna are more than evident with the attempt to form the women’s awareness raising group and constant criticisms of the domesticity of the Stepford women.

Oz, in his 2004 adaptation, again concentrates on the characters of Bobbie and Joanna as the subversive elements within Stepford society. Both characters’ lack of adherence to the feminine dress code prescribed by Wellington is acknowledged with both either donning black or dishevelled attire. Bobbie is presented as the more predominant rebel, which is accentuated with Oz converting the Levin’s original character to be of Jewish origin, therefore, making her a misfit before she even attempts to converse and interact. The book club scene highlights both the non-conformist nature of Bobbie and the contrast between the females within the group as the established “wives” focus upon the potential use of the pine cone as a Christmas decoration. Bobbie’s simply reveals her insubordination by responding “…and I’m going to attach a pine cone to the end of my vibrator and have a really merry Christmas”. Her house is in continual disarray and she eats ice-cream straight from the tub. However, even Bobbie, the staunch advocate of female Figure 20 individuality, succumbs to the desires of her husband and is transformed into an automaton (see figure 20). The feminist issues evident within Levin’s novel are not brought to the fore, especially in terms of female sexuality and deviance as Oz is intent on revealing the negative repercussions of the feminist movement within the post-modern world. The adaptation becomes more of a parodied attack on feminism by positing a woman as the ultimate villain with the subversive female character deemed as insignificant.

56 3.5 Sexuality and reproduction Female sexuality and reproduction are recurrent themes within the dystopian text. The text explores sexuality as a means of contrast to the biological subjectivity of the female by the state. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred frequently contemplates her own sexuality through considerations of bodily functions, such as the fascination with blood/menstruation. Gilead represses female sexuality and deviance from the enforced norms of society is met with punishments, such as the “Salvagings”.85 The attire of the Handmaid in itself is suggestive of a nun’s habit within the strict regime that promotes the optimisation of reproduction. The only permissible outlet for sexual intimacy and physical contact with the opposite sex is via the “Ceremony”. Offred seeks alternative means for sexual expression. Firstly, innocently through the playing of Scrabble with the Commander as we see the desire for language replacing the desire for physical intimacy – “Caught in the act, sinfully scrabbling. Quick eat those words.”86 Secondly, through her approved affair with Nick. Each furtive liaison could potentially result in the production of progeny for the state.

Schlöndorff appropriates the sexual scenes from the novel and through the utilisation of visual imagery amplifies the fundamental sexual narrative. The audience is presented with two scenes of the Ceremony from different angles – one that places the audience as voyeur and the other, a point of view shot in which the audience is placed in the position of Serena Joy (see figure 21). The functionality of the first “meeting” is evident as we witness the Commander’s violation of Kate for the good of the state. However, the exclusion of vulgarisms from the novel, such as Offred’s reference to the Commander as “a dripping tap” results in a reinforcement of Kate’s passivity and compliance as she lies back unassuming. The second meeting proves to be more intimate as the Commander reaches out to touch Kate due to the development of their relationship. Schlöndorff accentuates these unemotional events with the introduction of passionate scenes between Kate and Nick.

85 “Salvagings” as an execution of a female who has committed a crime, usually of a sexual nature, via hanging in front of a participatory audience of fellow women. 86 Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, op.cit., p.191

57

Figure 21 Figure 22 The audience again becomes voyeur as we stand at the window to Nick’s apartment observing the couple partaking in forbidden intercourse (see figure 22). Through this the director is able to comply with the requirements of film industry regarding sensationalisation and is also able to convey Kate as a weak female who becomes reliant upon Nick within future scenes. It is interesting to note that Schlöndorff places the couple within the traditional missionary position within this scene, therefore, affirming the role of the female as inferior – literally beneath the male.

In contrast to Atwood’s reliance on the reader to infer the sexual from Offred’s word play, Levin utilises overtly sexual references throughout The Stepford Wives. For example, the sex scene between Joanna and Walter which occurs after she interrupts his masturbation and the conversation between Joanna, Bobbie and Charmaine Wimperis regarding Ed Wimperis’s sexual fetishes. However, sexuality within the respective adaptations of the novels is restricted to the narrative and dialogue between characters. In Forbes’s adaptation, the only elements of sexual deviance are a conversation between Joanna and Walter regarding their sex life (Walter: Ever make it in front of a log fire? Joanna: Not with you), Joanna as voyeur during an intimate scene between Carol and Ted Van, to which Walter refers to as “soft core porno” and Joanna and Bobbie as voyeurs listening to the sexual activity of a Stepford couple (we hear screams of “You’re the best Frank. You’re the champion. Oooh, you’re the master.”) Similarly, Oz’s adaptation is deficient in visual imagery. The only references to sex are a brief conversation between Joanna and Walter (Joanna: Is there anything that I don’t do that you’d like me to do? Or that I do do that you’d like me not to?) and the appropriation of both the sexual fetish conversation and the voyeurism of

58 Joanna and Bobbie (plus Roger Bannister, one half of the token homosexual couple) as utilised in Forbes’s adaptation. The concentration in both adaptations is on the narrative rather than physical activity.

3.6 Physicality and the body The actual physicality of the female character plays an important role within the dystopian text and is obviously more significant within the adaptation due to the transferral of descriptive narrative to visual appearance. Within both The Handmaid’s Tale and The Stepford Wives, reference is given to the connection between physicality and mentality. The body becomes evidence of female subjectivity and cultural positioning. Women are revealed as continuing to fashion themselves according to the traditional notions of femininity and beauty despite the harsh, desolate future landscape and maturation becomes an increasing concern. The respective adaptations can be seen to amplify this obsession with the female physical self due to the extent of media control over body image. The struggle for female perfection becomes a fixation for both male and female, albeit one in which the female is pandering the desires of the male. In this respect, it is interesting to note the physical similarities between correspondent characters within each adaptation (see Appendix Four: Character Mapping) through the respecive director’s utilisation of standardised cinematic feminine types.

Within The Handmaid’s Tale in particular, Atwood presents a protagonist who is imprisoned within her own body as “to be seen is…to be penetrated.”87 The society of Gilead relegates women to objects and therefore, the body becomes fragmented. At the Red Centre women are trained to understand their own bodies in order to control the advances of men which results in the protagonist’s fear and repulsion of her own body. The Handmaid’s are viewed as “mere appendages to those men who exercise mastery over them.”88 Their bodies are the property of the state and even clothing signifies imprisonment. The contrast between the standard issue red habit of the Handmaid, complete with veil as indicator of silence, and the clothing of the “external” world is

87 Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale, op.cit., p.39 88 Malak, Amin, op,cit., p.11

59 evident when Offred visits Jezebels with the Commander. The falsity of femininity is revealed with the presentation of women wearing provocative costumes from the “time before”. Women still desire to maintain their physical appearance, as can be seen with Offred’s request to the Commander for hand cream and age becomes a constant consideration for the Handmaid due to their ability to conceive the necessary child for their employer.

In his adaptation, Schlöndorff intensifies Atwood’s conveyance of the physical with the use of camera angles that “slice and dice female bodies” – to be observed in the Ceremony scenes (see figure 21).89 The director uses various shots of Kate reflected in mirrors, symbolising her imperfection, but more significantly provides the audience with gratuitous shots of the female body. At one point, we observe Kate topless gazing from her bedroom window at the night sky, only to be caught by Nick who promptly directs her back inside (see figure 23). Further Figure 23 shots are presented during the sex scenes between Kate and Nick (see figure 22). In terms of the attire of the women of Gilead, Schöndorff adheres to Atwood’s descriptions of the standardised dress codes of the different strata of women with the use of vivid reds (Handmaids) and blues (Commander Wives). In contrast to this, he reveals “the spectacles women used to make of themselves” with the utilisation of scantily clad women wearing outrageously slutty costumes within the scenes at Jezebels.90 Schlöndorff’s narrative at this point becomes very blunt as he veers from Offred’s description of herself as “a travesty, in bad make up and someone else’s clothes, used glitz” to Kate’s description of Moira as “the whore of Babylon”.91 The director focuses on the sexual and sensational elements of the novel in order to present the visual stimulating.

89 Bodelson, Amery, ‘Redemptive Restrooms: Moments of Utopic Possibility in Volker Schlöndorff’s Film Version of The Handmaid’s Tale’, The Journal of Midwest Modern Language Association, Volume 39 Issue 1, 2006, p.65 90 Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale, op.cit., p.65 91 Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale, op.cit., p.266

60 The focus in Levin’s The Stepford Wives is evidently the transformation of the female to automaton. Little reference is provided throughout the text to the actual physicality of the female characters, therefore, providing the adaptor with a blank canvas. In his 1975 adaptation, Forbes provides a contrast between the newcomers to the community, Joanna and Bobbie, and the existing Stepford wives through the use of costume. Both Joanna and Bobbie are frequently observed wearing masculinised or revealing clothing (see figure 24) whereas the existing Step ford women don Laura Ashley styled dresses. Through this, Forbes conveys the supposed provocative, carefree nature of the feminist (via the Figure 24 revelation of Joanna’s midriff) and the staid nature of the robot “wife” (a typical 1950s Friedan female).92 Walter’s comment to Ted Van Sant regarding Mrs Van Sant, “She cooks as good as she looks Ted” is somewhat ironic as the wives are hardly the most attractive and sexually stimulating of women. As with The Handmaid’s Tale, Forbes also utilises mirrors as a means through which to reveal a different, narcissistic view of the female. On a number of occasions, Joanna is viewed in front of a mirror, the camera focussing on her reflection. In particular, the scene following the meeting of the Men’s Association, where Ike Mazzard sketches her portrait (see figure 25). Joanna does not believe that the image sketched is a true likeness and then in the next instant, we observe Joanna reflected in her mirror, removing her make-up and Figure 25 pondering the sketch. This scene marks the transitional progress of Joanna from independent newcomer to domestically orientated automated wife.

92 The scriptwriter, Goldman, wanted to present the Step ford wives as playboy bunnies but this was vetoed by Forbes who instead chose a more feminine approach to the wives attire. Forbes also cast his wife, Nanette Newman, in the role of Carol Van Sant.

61

Oz updates Forbes’s adaptation with the presentation of the protagonist and fellow subversives clad in contemporary attire (for example, the black suit of Joanna) in contrast to the 1950s styled Claire Wellington and her female cohort. Oz emphasises (and parodies) the female desire to pay attention to her appearance which can be observed when Joanna visits the Stepford Day Spa: Joanna: “Wait, you work out dressed like this? Claire: “Well of course. Whatever we do, we always want to look our very best. I mean, why, imagine if our husbands saw us in worn, dark, urban sweat clothes with stringy hair and almost no makeup?”

Domesticity and the body beautiful go hand-in-hand within the Stepford of the millenium. Oz presents a society in which women are obsessed with their appearance which parallels the global increase in the number of women undergoing cosmetic surgery/enhancements at the beginnng of the twenty- first century.93 The casting of glamourous celebrities, such as Nicola Kidman in the role of Joanna, ensures that the audience is presented with characters which are beyond the norm of society in terms of appearance. The women within 2004 Stepford are not murdered and replaced with robots, as within Levin’s original text and Forbes’s 1975 adaptation, but are modified through the implantation of a microchip thus emphasising that the obsession with perfection is ongoing despite the attempts of the feminist movement to curb the continuation of patriarchal domination.

3.7 The idea of the perfect woman The patriarchal quest for utopia is revealed within the dystopian genre through the construction and installation of the perfect woman either subtly via enforced conformity or blatantly via the use of technology. Within the feminist dystopia, the creation of the perfect female in the eyes of the male is, has already been discussed, one of the predominant themes. The production of the synthetic women or the cloning of the individual is witnessed in The Handmaid’s Tale through the presentation of the Handmaids as mere

93 In the USA alone, the number of breast augmentation procedures increased by approximately 30% between 1997 and 2008 (information courtesy of Cosmetic Plastic Surgery Statistics: www.cosmeticplasticsurgerystatistics.com/statistics)

62 simulations created by the state, they are not “themselves”, and experience an artificial existence. The Stepford Wives provides a more obvious utopian female via the creation of female replicants.94 The male exerts power over the female through the use of technology in order to attain utopia and to prevent any opportunity of female progression within society.

The utilisation of technology within the precursor provides the adaptor with particularly cinematic material, especially when considering the futuristic nature of the genre. The robotic female, or gynoid, has been evident within the film industry since the release of Lang’s seminal production, Metropolis, in 1927 (see figure 26).95 Throughout the decades, film directors have included the gynoid within their productions as a means of symbolising technological advancement and the Figure 26 idealisation/subjugation of women. For example, the many variations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, such as Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), and the plethora of gynoid centric films appearing within the latter end of the twentieth century, such as Weird Science (1985) and Mannequin (1987).96 The director posits the ideology of the failure of patriarchy with men seeking alternative means through which to oppress women. Woman is revealed as utilitarian object via the transformation to automaton, a belief that already exists within the feminist movement with women positioned as insignificant domestic slaves.

As stated previously, the women presented within The Handmaid’s Tale are constrained to such an extent by the state of Gilead that they become

94 The term “replicant” first appeared in Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner (1982) in reference to bioengineered beings who closely resemble human beings. 95 The term “gynoid” was first coined by Gwyneth Jones in her novel, Divine Endurance (1985), as a means of describing a female humanoid. 96 The basic plot of Weird Science (1985) reveals two teenage boys who, inspired by Frankenstein, create the perfect female robot in terms of intelligence and appearance. Mannequin (1987) follows the male protagonist’s desire to create a perfect mannequin. Upon completion, the protagonist promptly falls in love with the mannequin.

63 shadows of their former selves. The Handmaids in particular are commodities distributed amongst the Commanders solely for the purpose of reproduction. Biological reproduction itself becomes mechanised with the ritual of the monthly ceremony. It is only when the relationship between Offred and the Commander intensifies that the reader is presented with the extent of the void within Offred’s life. To him I am no longer merely a usable body. To him I’m not just a boat with no cargo, a chalice with no wine in it, an oven – to be crude – minus the bun. To him I am not merely empty.97

Atwood alludes to the artificiality of both present and past with the inclusion of references to the falsity of the media and the female. As Offred states of Serena Joy: “…there’s a hint of her former small-screen mannequin’s allure.”98 Schlöndorff conveys the vacuity of the protagonist and other female characters through the presentation of the banality of life within Gilead. From the weekly shopping routine to the monthly gynaecological examination, the women of Gilead are subjected to the drudgery of daily dystopian life (which is enhanced by the director’s casting of passive actors). The Ceremony scenes emphasise the fact that sex has become impersonal with the positioning of fully clothed characters on the bed, devoid of emotion and the act being carried out merely to fulfil the wishes of the state.

Levin’s The Stepford Wives remains infamous within contemporary society due to the inclusion of automated women and the dramatic means by which their predecessors meet their fate. The Stepford wives are literally man-made objects who serve as the perfect combination of household machine and sexual slave. Levin utilises a sense of irony and male-female camaraderie throughout the novel with dialogue such as Bobbie’s exclamation regarding her husband: “Isn’t he a doll?” providing the reader with a sense of what is yet to come.99 His critical stance concerning the male domination of society via the utilisation of technology echoes the concerns of Friedan within The Feminine Mystique, as Friedan states: “Women are human beings, not stuffed

97 Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale., op.cit., p.172 98 Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale., op.cit., p.216 99 Levin, Ira., op.cit., p.37

64 dolls, not animals.”100 Levin, however, seems to highlight that the transformation of women is the result of the actions of society as a whole rather than simply the effort of the male population.

The purpose of both the adaptation(s) and novel of The Stepford Wives is “to force the spectators or readers to reflect over issues that might prove disturbing.”101 The opening scenes of Forbes’s 1975 adaptation provide the viewer with a visual taste of what is to come with Joanna witnessing a man carrying a naked mannequin across the road (see figure 27). The mannequin is used throughout films within the latter end of the twentieth century as a symbol of female subservience within future society. For example, the female mannequins contained within Kubrick’s 1971 adaptation of A Clockwork Orange (see figure 28). Forbes reveals the attainment of perfection via the

Figure 27 Figure 28 mechanisation of the human body but also the consequences of such an obsession. For example, he reveals the robotic version of Bobbie within the kitchen – an appliance amongst other appliances – malfunctioning. Unfortunately Forbes’s concentration on the technological aspect of the novel results in a neglect of the non-automated characters who, as stated previously, frequently appear as impassive. As one review stated of the film: The Stepford Wives is a film that is pretty scathing in its view of men and what they want from women. On the other hand women don’t get off lightly either – the film seeming to say that they aren’t far removed from machines anyway, where the only difference between the humans and

100 Paasonen, Susanna, op.cit., p.196 It is interesting to note that following part of this paragraph is omitted from the Penguin Edition, 2010: “A baked potato is not as big as the world, and vacuuming the living room floor-- with or without makeup--is not work that takes enough thought or energy to challenge any woman's full capacity. Women are human beings, not stuffed dolls, not animals.” 101 Czarniawska, Barbara and Gustavsson, Eva, op.cit., p.669

65 the robot duplicates seems to be that the robots don’t grudgingly complain before they do the housework.102

In contrast to Forbes, Oz in his 2004 adaptation appears to suggest that it is women themselves who are remodelling themselves rather than being transformed by men. By placing the villain of the film as a female, Claire Wellington, Oz posits the production of female cyborgs – women with intelligence, beauty and stamina – as a potential threat to the patriarchal order of society but in the same instance presents women as dolls who are aesthetically pleasing and dress purely for the pleasure of men. The female is programmed via the “Female Improvement Machine”, rather than murdered and duplicated as in Levin’s novel and Forbes’s adaptation, to conform to the ideals of the matriarch as all she wishes to do is create “a better world. A world where men and women were cherished and lovely.” As in Forbes’s adaptation, women become completely objectified, which Oz depicts in the most deplorable of scenes whereby he reveals one of the Stepford wives as a

Figure 29 cash machine (see figure 29). As in The Handmaid’s Tale, women become mere “vessels” which contain (or are supposed to contain in terms of progeny) resources for the patriarchal state. He postulates that the duplication of the self is symbolic of the cloning and genetic research prevalent at the latter end of the twentieth-century. Oz appears to suggest that it is women who are behind the advancement of technology with the presentation of Claire Wellington as once the “world’s foremost brain surgeon and genetic engineer.” Oz suggests that the feminist movement has actually reverted back to Friedan’s 1950s society with the women being viewed as wife, mother and domestic goddess due to the fact that post-modern women want it all. This is adequately summarised by Oz during dialogue between Joanna and Mike Wellington: Mike: “Everything is copacetic. Welcome to the future!”

102 Moria, The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review (http://www.moria.co.nz/sciencefiction/stepfordwives1975.htm)

66 Joanna: “Is this what you really want? Women who behave like slaves, women who are obsessed with cleaning their kitchens and doing their hair, women who never challenge you in any way? Women who exist only to wait on you hand and foot?” Mike: “Yeah. That sounds good to me.”

The women of the future, and indeed present, are subject to the desires of the male with the resultant being the manufacture of an idealised female, whether via literal or physical means.

67 4. Adaptation as Process

The representation of women from text to screen is subject to the various production elements within the film industry. The functionality of the cinema affects the director’s portrayal of the textual female character on screen. This chapter will consider the potential effect of the gender of author/director on the interpretation of the precursor text in terms of the feminine and feminist ideologies, the patriarchal domination of the film industry, cinematic standardisation, Hollywood’s emphasis on nostalgia elements within film historical context (especially in relation to the feminist movement), the collaborative nature of the film industry, and how the director chooses to convey the first person narrative in the text in adaptation.

The complexity of the relationship between dystopia and science-fiction, as discussed in the first chapter, is revealed with the film industry veering towards the massification of the media via the inclusion of computer generated special effects and the addition of other worldly life forms in order to satisfy audience hunger for fantastical imagery and escapism. The film industry is perpetually seeking a unique production formula that creates (or recreates) adaptations that both honour the precursor text and produce original “texts” whilst at the same time meeting the expectations of all audience members. Fidelity will always remain a consideration but should only be regarded to a certain extent, as the adaptation should be viewed as an original work or “text”. As Offred states within The Handmaid’s Tale: One and one and one and one doesn’t equal four. Each one remains unique, there is no way of joining them together. They cannot be exchanged, one for the other.103

Dystopias are multilayered texts that combine reference to past, present and future. The cinema resides within the present tense and therefore, must artificially signify layers of time. This, combined with the insistence of filmmakers in placing the dystopian literary adaptation within the arena of science-film, results in genre blurring within the adaptation. The precursor text is obviously open to interpretation from both screenwriter and adaptor

103 Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale, op.cit., p.201

68 regardless of genre inferences but the dystopian nature of the text can be seen as a distraction from the feminist context.

The adaptor is challenged with a plethora of issues regarding genre and the potential target audience even before feminist themes within the dystopian text and how such themes may be conveyed on film can be considered. As Paul Ruders, composer of the operatic version of The Handmaid’s Tale (first premiered in 2000), states of the novel: …it has everything - forbidden love, religion, violence, tenderness. And it's a thriller: the story of how a Handmaid escapes from Gilead...Or maybe she doesn't....And it's a warning against intolerance and oppression, of women first and foremost, but against right-wing oppression of any kind, at any time, any place...It could be prophetic ...104105

Schlöndorff in his 1995 filmic adaptation seemingly struggles with the idea of genre, especially in terms of feminist ideals, and the resultant is a film that portrays a duality of romance and totalitarianism narratives with romance becoming the more dominant. Similarly The Stepford Wives does not fit snugly within the dystopian or science-fiction genre and at times is more aligned with the gothic thriller. Forbes’s 1975 adaptation retains some fidelity by adhering to the horror genre and Oz’s 2004 adaptation can be classed as pure post-modern comedy.

4.1 Sexuality versus textuality When analysing any feminist themed text, it is impossible to ignore the gender of the author. Dystopian literature is considered to be the domain of the male author and therefore, contains predominantly masculine ideologies and themes, such as patriarchal totalitarianism and the advancement of technology. More often than not female characters are provided with secondary, subjugated roles within the text and feminist themes are rarely brought to the forefront. The male perspective on feminist attitudes and

104 Bentley, Paul, quoted in Domville, Eric, ‘The Handmaid’s Detail: Notes on the Novel and Opera’, University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 75 Issue 3, Summer 2006, pp.876 105 Unfortunately, I am unable to provide considerable insight into the operatic version of The Handmaid’s Tale as I have been unable to ascertain a copy of the opera.

69 themes is far different from the female perspective. The female author is obviously able to provide a greater insight into her life - the life of a woman - than the male author, who obviously has to project a substantial amount of discourse. Each sex is biased towards their own gender despite blatant attempts to incorporate a balanced view of the sexes. For example, in The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood presents a futuristic world in which men are treated as unjustly as women and suffer from the same anxieties within society. However, Atwood’s emphasis is on the feminine and the subjugation of women through enforced reproduction for the greater good of society. The female dystopian author tends to concentrate on the projection of past and present feminist themes into a future society against a background of the harsh landscape with little concentration on technology. The journey of the protagonist is one of emotion and contains introspective narrative as can be seen with the character of Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale and her constant recollection of memories and their relation to her present.

The male-authored text cannot escape from being presented from a male perspective, regardless of the extent of the knowledge (or beliefs) of the author regarding the feminist movement. As Beryl Langer states: Of course women face problems that are different from the ones faced by male writers because women are different from men… The way a man reads a woman’s text is different from the way a woman reads a woman’s text. It has to be. The way a woman reads a man’s text is different from the way a man reads a man’s text. So of course the problems are different.106

The author employs narrative strategies that attempt to coerce the reader into viewing the text from a female point of view (the same can be applied to the adaptation of the novel) but this deconstruction of the masculine often results in the deconstruction of the feminine. In The Stepford Wives, Levin presents a female protagonist but adopts the third person narrative, therefore, maintaining a certain distance from the ideologies contained within the text. We see Joanna as first and foremost a visitor to an alien territory that of the

106 Langer, Beryl, ‘There Are No Texts Without Life’, in Ingersoll, Earl G. (ed.), Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood, Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 2006, p.136

70 male dominated Stepford. The dystopic, masculine elements of the text overshadow the feminine related themes. The reader gains an overview of feminist themes but not on a personal level, from the perspective of the female. We encounter an enforcement of female stereotypes and a particular negativity through the text rather than the advocation of positivity and a potential change in feminist attitudes. Male feminism can be seen as paradoxical in nature – it can never be truly feminist due to the gender status of the male author. The emphasis of the male author may be gender difference but the gender bias of author and subject remains with the resultant being a “no-woman’s” land.

4.2 Patriarchal domination of the cinema In the literary tradition, the male is viewed as superior to the female, especially in terms of the dystopian text. This conviction is echoed with the evidently patriarchal domination of the film industry. The film industry still remains a predominantly male arena in terms of authoritative figures within studios and directorship, amongst other significant roles. The female director only appears to become prevalent towards the end of the twentieth century with examples such as Jane Campion: The Piano (1993), The Portrait of a Lady (1996) and Bright Star (2009) and Gurinder Chadha: Bend it Like Beckham (2002), Bride and Prejudice (2004) and Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging (2008) and female auteurs are few and far between (the most notable, potential auteur being Kathryn Bigelow, director of the hard-hitting The Hurt Locker, 2008). Such directors/films do not address, indeed challenge, feminist issues and adhere to the constraints of the patriarchal film industry. Against this male dominated background it is problematic to adequately present the themes of the feminist dystopian text and the female character. There is a necessity to move across gender established gender boundaries within each medium to ensure that the female character, feminist themes or indeed female director are not alienated.

The film industry appears responsible for the misrepresentation of the female on screen and the misunderstanding of feminist issues both within the precursor text and within societal contexts. Male directors act as voyeurs

71 when conveying feminist themes on screen, especially when the precursor text is female-authored. There is a continuation of the assertion of patriarchal authority with the male director’s attempted appropriation of the feminine, which merely serves as an enhancement of that authority. The feminist discourse of the precursor text is negated in favour of the presentation of the traditional female role. As Kempley states of Schlöndorff’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale: And one can't help but wonder why a woman didn't direct this movie about women being dominated by men. "The Handmaid's Tale" is less a reproductive horror story than a blanked-out bodice ripper, another femme fatality.107

The three adaptations in question adhere to the patriarchal norms of the film industry and present the viewer with masculine generated imagery of women. Not only are the dystopian themes diluted from the precursor text, the feminist themes in the adaptations become insipid when transferred to the screen as the director adheres to the standardised norms of the cinema and attempts to meet with audience expectation.

4.3 Collaborative Nature of Film Industry The analogy of one man’s dream is another man’s nightmare provides an adequate description for the collaborative nature of the film industry. The dystopian adaptation is not simply the product of a single individual but a collaboration of author, screenwriter, director plus a plethora of cast and crew. The result is a film that contains an amalgamation of perspectives and ideas. A perfect example this can be seen in the transferral of The Handmaid’s Tale from text to screen. Atwood’s original text was appropriated by Harold Pinter as scriptwriter. Pinter deviated from the precursor text throughout the screenplay, for example, he transformed the ending with Kate (Offred) being reunited with her daughter (the traditional Hollywood happy ending). As Gale states of Pinter’s work on The Handmaid’s Tale: he “creates a unique work of art, different from its source and capable of standing on its own as a work of

107 Kempley, Rita, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, The Washington Post, 9 March 1990

72 art.”108 The adaptation suffered a series of changes throughout its production with the initial director, Karel Reisz withdrawing from the film when the production company refused to fund heavy populated scenes due budget limitations. Schlöndorff then replaced Reisz and Pinter decided he could no longer work on the production. Pinter’s original script became completely distorted in terms of both plot and dialogue. Schlöndorff even replaced parts of the script with dialogue from the actual cast. For example, Robert Duvall (“the Commander”) ad-libbed many of his lines as he found Pinter’s language to be somewhat elusive. As one film critic stated of the adaptation: [Sadly] the faults in the film lie in Harold Pinter’s uncharacteristically bland script, and often woefully inadequate design and direction: the latter often missing opportunities in key scenes, the former full of rather tacky and silly uniforms, symbols, vehicles and particularly crass watchtowers.109

Even Atwood herself had extensive input towards the end of production as she agreed to the director’s change of ending. To use another, rather more clichéd analogy, the adaptation became a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth – a culmination of excessive tension between collaborators and insufficient concentration upon the key themes and narrative of the text.

4.4 Cinematic standardisation The conventions of the film industry and the insistence on the traditional norms evident in the majority of films are integral to the success of the literary adaptation regardless of the precursor’s genre. In terms of the dystopia, it is difficult to convey the desolate, bleak landscape of the traditional dystopian text with the necessary Hollywood glorious technicolour. For example, in The Handmaid’s Tale, Schlöndorff chooses to focus upon the various colours of the women’s designated clothing against the stark background of Gilead. Admittedly the viewer is forced to concentrate on the main focal point of the narrative – the women – but the bleakness of Atwood’s text is not fully realised. As one critic states of the film:

108 Gale, Steven H., Sharp Cut: Harold Pinter's Screenplays and the Artistic Process, University of Kentucky Press, 2002, p.94 109 Adams, Derek, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale ’, Time Out: London, 1990, http://www.timeout.com/film/reviews/71666/the_handmaids_tale.html

73

Atwood’s often internal tale is bluntened and transformed into a portrait of a Dystopian society that is written in the large, bold colours of Hollywood making a message. But there’s no credible resonance to fundamentalism – the future world exists in a cultural vacuum.110

The two adaptations of The Stepford Wives are contrasting in production aesthetics with Forbes’s assigning his1975 adaptation to the horror genre with the inclusion of the gothic Victorian mansion, the home of the Stepford Men’s Association (see figure 30) and the frequent use of inclement weather but yet as a director he still manages to include a certain amount of the obligatory colour with the juxtaposition of city (Manhattan) versus rural (Stepford) and the vibrant Laura Ashley styling of the costumes of the Stepford wives (see figure 31). Similarly, we see more than the infusion of colour in Oz’s 2004

Figure 30 Figure 31 adaptation with what can only be termed as the Hollywood “orange fuzzy hue”. Oz’s reluctance to portray the precursor text as dystopia is more than evident in the use of vibrant colour throughout the entirety of the adaptation, from setting to costume, the emphasis is upon the utopic and a possible enhanced status of living for both men and women within the twenty-first century.

As stated previously, audience consideration is instrumental in the director’s decision in what appears on the screen. There is a desire for simplified entertainment that does not challenge the audience – what you see is what you get. Cinema is a means of escapism for the audience and therefore, the film studio’s concentration is on pacifying the masses in order to increase

110 Moira: Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Review, (http://www.moria.co.nz/sciencefiction/handmaidstale.htm)

74 profit margins. A resultant is the negation of the complexity of the narrative in the dystopian text in favour of a linear, comprehensible narrative. In The Handmaid’s Tale, we see the removal of various analepses and prolepses that constitute Offred’s reflections on both past and present in favour of an undemanding narrative. The themes of the dystopian text are also simplified, especially in the case of the adaptations in question, in order to produce a film which satisfies the wider audience. This is more than evident in the case of the feminist literary adaptation as the director fails to encompass feminist themes to a greater extent in favour of concentration on general, overarching themes such as totalitarianism or the use of technology.

Imagery is obviously the first and foremost concern within the film industry. Directors concentrate their production efforts on the visual elements of the adaptation rather than the plot. The increasing use of computer generated imagery within all films, but particularly those regarded as science-fiction or dystopian, results in a distraction from the narrative and plot that are intrinsic to the literary dystopia. In the case of the adaptations in question, the director’s concern lies with the most dramatic and cinematic elements of the text. In his 1975 adaptation of The Stepford Wives, Forbes concentrates upon the automation of the women of Stepford against the bleak but supposedly cheerful landscape of the suburban-gated community. The most dramatic appears with the climatic chase scene towards the end of the film that culminates in the strangulation of the female protagonist, Joanna, with a pair of panty hose at the hands of her own automated doppelganger (a scene which does not exist within the novel). Similarly, Oz in his 2004 adaptation spends a significant amount of running time on the female automatons and their function/malfunction against the landscape of lavish, big budget, garish sets.

In The Handmaid’s Tale, Schlöndorff chooses to spend time lingering on scenes such as the “salvagings” and “particution”, which undoubtedly make for great cinematic viewing. For example, during the salvaging we hear the collective humming and chanting of the Handmaid’s as they pull the rope attached to their comrade who is guilty of fornication with a member of

75 Gilead’s medical staff. We then see the stark image of a Handmaid hanging against a panoramic shot of the entire female audience clothed in their red, white and blue uniforms (reminiscent of the American flag that obviously has connotations of power Figure 32 and patriarchal control) – see figure 32. Such concentration on the spectacular is at the expense of any narrative explanation for the generation of the society of Gilead and the reflections of the female protagonist. Female characters become mere props to enable the director to satisfy the audience’s desire for visual entertainment.

Towards the end of the film, Schlöndorff’s transforms Offred from passive submissive into Kate the murderess, with the brutal assassination of the Commander (a definite end to the main patriarch within the text). Schlöndorff expands on the sexual themes contained within the text with the inclusion of erotic scenes, therefore, again pandering to the Hollywood desire for sensationalisation and the presentation of sex as liberation. For example, we see a voyeuristic scene of Offred and Nick having sexual intercourse and a shot of Offred naked at her bedroom window (see figures 21 and 22). The for scintillation in order to sell the film/adaptation commences with the marketing of The Handmaid’s Tale. The USA/UK version of the poster portrays a scantily clad Offred (Natasha Richardson) accompanied by the strap-line “One woman’s story. Every woman’s fear.”111 (see figure 33) The emphasis is on the feminine but with negative connotations. Even before the audience sees the film they are Figure 33 subjected to the ideology of female as mere sexual being via almost pornographic terms/images. The suggestion being that the adaptation is more concerned with sexuality than the portrayal of feminist themes.

111 Further international posters advertising The Handmaid’s Tale are available in Appendix Five, p.102

76 Atwood’s initial feminist discourse becomes over-simplified in order for the film industry to advertise the adaptation – put simply, sex sells.

The utilisation of conventional film industry norms to satisfy the potential audience is most evident within the inclusion of the traditional Hollywood happy ending in the majority of films. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Schlöndorff pursues the ubiquitous, happy ending as we see Offred ensconced in a remote caravan on a non-descript mountain awaiting the arrival of her unborn child and the potential return of her initial rescuer, Nick. Whilst not providing a positive conclusion to the adaptation we are left with the persistence of hope, evident within feminist dystopias, through the use of an open ending. The final scenes of The Stepford Wives (1975) are devoted to the potential escape of Joanna from the murderous clutches of the Men’s Association again Forbes retains the persistence of hope. Even within the ending, whereby Joanna has succumbed to the status of Stepford wife, there remains a glimmer of hope for the remaining women of the community. The ending of Oz’s 2004 adaptation is ridiculously ecstatic with the downfall of the manipulative Claire Wellington, the wonderful reunification of Joanna and Walter Eberhart and the closing scene revealing the subordinate men of Stepford. As one critic has stated of the film: This film has perhaps the most poorly constructed denouement seen in a film this year. Events happen without explanation, characters’ motivations change on a whim, and silliness prevails over all else. The ending to The Stepford Wives is just plain awful.112

The adaptor attempts to conform to the cinematic standardisation of the film industry to such an extent that the adaptation, in particular the ending, becomes comical rather than hopeful.

4.5 Harking back to the past (rather than the future) The film industry’s emphasis upon happy endings can be viewed within the wider context of its obsession with nostalgia. Dystopian films can be seen as cultural texts, reflecting past, present and future within the historical context of the time of release. Adaptations especially must be considered in relation to

112 Rickey, Joe, ‘The Stepford Wives’, Sci-Fi Movie Page, http://www.scifimoviepage.com/stepford2.html

77 their intertexts, such as the precursor, allusion to other texts and marketing (as we have already seen with The Handmaid’s Tale - figure 33). Towards the end of the twentieth century, the film industry, particularly within the USA, became obsessed with the utopian elements of the past. Films were released which harked back to “happier” times with the inclusion of 1950s imagery, such as Back to the Future (1985) and Pleasantville (1998).113 Centred round the typical USA suburbia, these films presented the audience with the idea of the utopian society. Such films not only replicated the 1950s environment but provided an insight into the habitants of both past and present societies, especially in terms of gender and gender relations. The opening sequence of Pleasantville, for example, reveals the 1950s perfect nuclear family living the perfect lifestyle within the perfect house. We see the mother figure as the mainstay of the home, spending the majority of her time within the kitchen (see figure 34). We again see this concentration on the status of the female within the 1950s in the opening sequence of The Stepford Wives in 2004 (see figure 35). Oz is seemingly harking back to a better time within society, one

Figure 34 Figure 35 in which the patriarch was autonomous and the women’s place was within the home but yet everyone was supposedly content. Both films are satirical in nature, as the subjugated role of the female is revealed as unsatisfactory as the film progresses but yet the lasting image of this stereotypical traditional

113 The basic plot of Pleasantville reveals two siblings within 1990s America (present dystopia) who are physically absorbed into a television set and transported back in time to idealistic 1950s suburbia of the sitcom Pleasantville. The teenagers attempt to educate the inhabitants of this suburbia by exposing them to the life of the 1990s. Gradually the town of Pleasantville literally turns from black and white into vibrant colour. The film confronts the issues of both dystopic and utopic living through the different perspectives of the main characters.

78 view of women remains, the view that was deconstructed by Betty Friedan within The Feminine Mystique a decade later in 1963.

4.6 Historical Context The novels of both The Handmaid’s Tale and The Stepford Wives make allusion to the 1950s with Atwood incorporating the colour red into text as the colour of the Handmaids’ attire (a possible connection to the “Red Scare” period of the 1950s with McCarthy’s crusade against communism) and Levin’s blatant inclusion of references to Friedan’s text and its contents. The director of the dystopian adaptation therefore, has to contend with various different time periods. There is the lapse in time between the publication of the text and the production/release of the adaptation together with the variety of time periods evident within the precursor text. We see different directional interpretations according to the historical context, in terms of the texts in question and the feminist movement. Not only does the screenwriter/director have to contend with the dystopian elements of the text, from past to present to future, but also has to produce an adaptation which incorporates contemporary feminist themes.

Schlöndorff’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale glosses over the feminist ideologies contained within Atwood’s original text in favour of basic plotlines and brief glimpses of sensationalism. The director fails to provide a presentation of women that can be placed appropriately within its historical context or indeed the future. The adaptation does not seem to correlate to either the year of publication (1985) and the height of the second-wave feminist era, or the year of film release (1990) and the move towards post- feminism. Forbes’s adaptation of The Stepford Wives on the other hand provides a satirical view of the male backlash against the feminist movement, which may be due to the proximity of the release of the film, 1975, to Levin’s text, 1972. The adaptation is often regarded as faithful to the precursor text with the inclusion of contradictory perspectives on the feminist movement. Oz’s 2004 adaptation strives to provide a perspective on the change in feminism and feminist attitudes, over thirty years after the text’s publication,

79 but only seems to revert back to 1950s stereotypical views of the female and her place within society. As Reeder states of the adaptation: The failure to fully explore the issues raised was perhaps understandable in the 1970s. It’s an insult now that we have three more decades of feminist thought under our belts.114

The adaptation fails to reflect the change in the status of the female within contemporary society.

4.7 Interiority of character As discussed previously, there is difficulty in transferring the female protagonist to the screen due to the character’s interiority. The director has a tendency to sacrifice the narrative for the sake of visual engagement with the audience, with tools such as cinematic technology. The primary focus of the adaptation then becomes plot rather than narrative. The interiority of the text I, therefore, seemingly incompatible with the subjectivity of the cinema - “the verbal limitation of the non-verbal experience” is revealed.115 Filmic techniques can be utilised, such as point of view shots, close-ups, analepses and prolepses, dream sequences but they cannot reveal true interiority of the dystopian protagonist. The resultant is consequently what Hutcheon terms as “telling rather than showing.”116 Regardless of whether the original textual narrative is first or third person, it is difficult to transfer complex characters from text to screen. As Bluestone states: The film, by arranging external signs for our visual perception, or by presenting us with dialogue, can lead us to infer thought. But it cannot show us thought directly. It can show us characters thinking, feeling, and speaking, but it cannot show us their thoughts and feelings. A film is not thought: it is perceived.117

The dystopian text is based predominantly around a central protagonist and therefore, the entirety of the narrative relates to this character. In terms of the feminist dystopia, the narrative is further character-centred due to its inherently self-reflexive nature. The narrative should challenge patriarchal

114 Reeder, Constance, ‘Stepford Feminism: Seen But Not Heard’, Off Our Backs, July-August 2004, p.52 115 Bluestone, George, Novels into Film, The John Hopkins University Press, 2003, p.46 116 Hutcheon, Linda, A Theory of Adaptation, New York: Routledge, 2006 117 Bluestone, George, op.cit., p.48

80 dominance and provide the viewer with a complete sense of character. Instead, the filmic adaptation seems to actively promote a certain empathetic distance between the viewer and the protagonist.

In the case of The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood presents a multilayered, first- person narrative that frequently engages directly with the reader – in the words of Offred, “You don’t tell a story only to yourself. There’s always someone else.”118 The narrative throughout the text is unreliable with the protagonist constantly reconstructing her “story”. Recollections of the past are intermingled with explanations of the present. In his adaptation, Schlöndorff negates these inconsistencies and chooses to adopt the preferred linearity of the film industry. He uses the familiar in terms of the narrative to ensure that the viewer is not lost within the adaptation but in doing so sacrifices the plot and, more importantly, the interiority of the main character, Offred. Atwood highlights the need for the presentation of comprehensive characters with a statement regarding perspective: What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions.119

Schlöndorff attempts to utilize the camera as narrator with flashbacks to the family’s attempted escape and visions of Offred’s daughter lost in the snow. He also incorporates various point of view shots in an attempt to consign the viewer to the role of Figure 36 protagonist (see figure 36 – view of the “unwomen”). A further filmic technique is adopted at the very end of the adaptation with the use of the only voice-over of the entire film as we see Kate (Offred) deliver her ever-hopeful monologue.

118 Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale, op.cit, p.47 119 Atwood Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale, op.cit., p.153

81 Schlöndorff’s omission of the “Historical Notes”, contained at the end of the Atwood’s text, ensures that the masculine discourse of Professor Pieixoto never reaches the screen. As Kauffman states: The traditional definitions of “feminine” speech versus “masculine” writing are [thus] accentuated in Atwood’s novel, the feminine is subjective, disordered, associative, illogical; the masculine is objective, orderly, controlled, logical. 120

Atwood’s juxtaposition of both feminine and masculine narratives provides the reader with different gender perspectives and the discourse of Pieixoto in particular highlights the continuing patriarchal domination of the female population in a distant future. The adaptation only presents the audience with the masculine interpretation of the text rather than the balanced view contained within Atwood’s text. The resultant being a distortion of the female characters on screen.

Whilst Levin’s novel of The Stepford Wives utilises the third-person narrative, Levin still adequately presents the interiority of character of the protagonist, Joanna Eberhart and other main characters. The reader is able to gain an overview of the ideology and reaction to the feminist movement of the 1960s/1970s in what is a relatively limited quantity of words (116 pages) through the perspective of Levin. However, as with the first-person narrative contained with The Handmaid’s Tale, the narrative becomes unreliable in nature as the reader is subjected to Levin’s male perspective on what can be regarded as a predominantly female-authored subject area. In Forbes’s adaptation of the text, the camera becomes the heterodiegetic narrator.121 The director utilises point

Figure 37

120 Kauffman, Linda, ‘Special Delivery: Twenty-first Century Epistolarity in The Handmaid’s Tale’ in Goldsmith, Elizabeth P. (ed), Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989, p.228 121 Genette theorised that narratives were either told by homodiegetic narrators (those of the first-person who affect the story being told) and heterodiegetic narrators (those of the third-person, a character who is not present within the story)

82 of view shots and voyeuristic camera angles to allow the viewer an omniscient Vantage point of the characters within the film. One such voyeuristic camera shot can be seen in figure 37 as we view the protagonist, Joanna, through stair banisters as she hides from her husband prior to her attempted escape. Again the sense of interiority appears to be lost as the camera/director attempts to be omniscient. Oz’s adaptation of The Stepford Wives fails to present the viewer with any form of internal focalisation. There is an abandonment of the potential means of revelation of interiority such as the point of view shot or voice over. The director provides the viewer with generic, stereotypical characters, for example, the homosexual male couple, with the concentration being large lavish sets and an all-star cast. Most importantly of all, in terms of the feminist themes of Levin’s precursor text, Oz presents stereotypical female roles and provides the audience with a feeling of lack of progress of the status of the female within the patriarchal world.

83 Conclusion

The adaptations of The Handmaid’s Tale and The Stepford Wives attempt to provide an adequate representation of the characterisations and themes contained within the precursor text but within a contemporary context. As dystopias they should reflect issues within present (and past) society and postulate potential futures and as feminist dystopias should highlight the abundance of issues concerning women, including the subjugation by patriarchal society. Both the texts and adaptations are somewhat superficial in addressing Friedan’s “the problem with no name” but yet they at least situate the question within the public domain, the latter being potentially on a larger scale through the cinema.122 There are insufficient subtleties relating to the ideology and potential threat of feminism and, therefore, each respective adaptation exudes an atmosphere of fear amongst audiences, both male and female. For example, Forbes’s 1975 adaptation of The Stepford Wives presents the viewer with the chilling assassinations of ordinary women at their hands of their supposedly loving husbands.

Women become the product of the male “gaze” in terms of the director (and collaborative partners), the potential male audience and the over-arching dominance of the patriarchal film industry with its many masculinised nuances. The director also concentrates upon remaining faithful to the precursor text whilst attempting to conform to the standardisation of the film industry and expectations of the viewing audience. The feminist dystopian text presents the director with a variety of issues that prove problematic when adapting for the screen and in the case of the three adaptations in question, results in the failure of the adaptation to satisfactorily appropriate the narrative, themes and characterisations, in particular that of the female character, to the screen.

122 Both the adaptations of The Handmaid’s Tale (1990) and Forbes’s The Stepford Wives (1975) suffered diminutive audience attendance (see Appendix Six: Science- Fiction Adaptations, 1980 to Present, USA Box Office Revenues, p.103 for comparative figures). Oz’s 2004 adaptation grossed significantly more revenue than the previous two feminist dystopian adaptations. It must be noted that Forbes’s 1975 adaptation later gained cult status and therefore, greater audience following the film’s re-release.

84 Each adaptation’s assignment of women to traditional, stereotypical roles, such as wife and mother, presents a continuation of the male desire to confine women to their biological functionality and the domestic realm. This merely serves as a reinforcement of pre-existing beliefs of women rather than serving as a warning to the viewer of the potentiality of a dystopian future based on the state of contemporary society. There is a considerable necessity for the film industry to convey positive female imagery with the presentation of strong female characters who aspire to greater climes within society whilst maintaining their femininity. Women who are not man-made products in either the literal (directorial creation) or physical (gynoid) sense. Such consideration would ensure that the presentation and (re)presentation of women within the cinema does not remain within the dark ages.

85 Bibliography

Secondary Sources Atwood, Margaret, ‘If You Can’t Say Something Nice, Don’t Say Anything At All’, in Glalt, George (ed.), The Thinking Heart: Best Canadian Essays, Ontario: Quarry Press, 1991

Atwood, Margaret, ‘Light in the wilderness’, interview with Robert Potts for The Guardian (online), Saturday 26 April 2003

Atwood, Margaret, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake “In Context”’, PMLA, Volume 119 Issue 2, 2004, pp.513-517

Baccolini, Raffaella, ‘The Persistence of Hope in Dystopian Science Fiction’, PMLA, Volume 119 Issue 3, 2004, pp.518-521

Baccolini, Raffaella and Moylan, Tom (eds.), Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, London: Routledge, 2003

Barr, Marleen, Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, Inc., 1987

Barr, Marleen (ed.), Future Females, the Next Generation: New Voices and Velocities in Feminist Science Fiction Criticism, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000

Bignell, Jonathan, ‘Lost Messages: The Handmaid’s Tale, Novel and Film, British Journal of Canadian Studies, Volume 8 Issue 1, 1993, pp.71-84

Bignell, Jonathan, ‘Une letter en souffrance: l’adaptation de La SerVante écarlate/The Handmaid’s Tale de Margaret Atwood au cinema’ in Cloarec, Nicole (ed.), Lettres de cinema: De la missive au film-lettre, Rennes: Rennes University Press, 2007, pp.175-187

Bluestone, George, Novels into Film, The John Hopkins University Press, 2003

Bodelson, Amery, ‘Redemptive Restrooms: Moments of Utopic Possibility in Volker Schlöndorff’s Film Version of The Handmaid’s Tale’, The Journal of Midwest Modern Language Association, Volume 39 Issue 1, 2006, pp.63- 72

Cavalcanti, Ildney, ‘The Writing of Utopia and the Feminist Critical Dystopia: Suzy McKee Charnas’s Holdfast Series’ in Baccolini, Raffaella and Moylan, Tom (eds.), Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, London: Routledge, 2003, pp.47-67

Cooper, Pamela, “A Body Story with a Vengeance”: Anatomy and Struggle in The Bell Jar and The Handmaid’s Tale, Women’s Studies, Volume 26, pp. 89-123, 1997

86 Cooper, Pamela, ‘Sexual Surveillance and Medical Authority in Two Versions of The Handmaid’s Tale, Journal of Popular Culture, Volume 28 Issue 4, 2004, pp.49-66

Czarniawska, Barbara and Gustavsson, Eva, ‘The (D)evolution of the Cyberwoman?’, Organization, Volume 15 Issue 5, 2008, pp.665-683

Davidson, Arnold E., ‘Future Tense: Making History in The Handmaid’s Tale’ in Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms, Kathryn VanSpanckeren and Jan Garden Castro (eds.), Southern Illinois University Press, 1988, pp.113-121 de Beauvoir, Simone, The Second Sex, London: David Campbell Publishers Ltd., 1993

Dodson, Danita J., ‘’We lives in the blank white spaces’: Rewriting the Paradigm of Denial in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale’, Utopian Studies, Volume 8, 1997, pp.6-86

Domville, Eric, ‘The Handmaid’s Detail: Notes on the Novel and Opera’, University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 75 Issue 3, Summer 2006, pp.869- 882

Dow, Bonnie J., ‘The Traffic in Men and the Fatal Attraction of Post-feminist Masculinity’, Women’s Studies in Communication. Volume 29 Issue 1, Spring 2006, pp.113-131

Feuer, Lois, ‘The Calculus of Love and Nightmare: The Handmaid’s Tale and the Dystopian Tradition’, Critique, Volume 38 Issue 2, Winter 1997

Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique, London: Penguin Books, 2010

Gale, Steven H., Sharp Cut: Harold Pinter's Screenplays and the Artistic Process, University of Kentucky Press, 2002

Hammer, Stephanie Barbe, ‘The World as it will be? Female Satire and the Technology of Power in The Handmaid’s Tale’, Modern Language Studies, Volume 20 Issue 2, 1990, pp.39-49

Helford, Elyce Rae, “It’s a Rip-Off of the Women’s Movement”: Second-Wave Feminism and The Stepford Wives in Inness, Sherrie A. (ed.), Disco Divas: Women and Popular Culture in the 1970s, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003, pp.24 - 38

Helford, Elyce Rae, ‘The Stepford Wives and the Gaze: Envisioning Feminism in 1975’, Feminist Media Studies, Volume 6 Issue 2, 2006, pp.145-156

Howells, Carol Ann (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006

87 Howells, Carol Ann, ‘Round table with Margaret Atwood’ in ‘Lacroix, Jean- Michel, Leclaire, Jacques and Warwick, Jack (eds.), The Handmaid’s Tale, roman proteen, Conference de Margaret Atwood: Genese du roman et fonction des Notes Historiques, Publications de l.Unversite de Rouen No. 253, November 1998, pp.15-24

Hutcheon, Linda, A Theory of Adaptation, New York: Routledge, 2006

Ingersoll, Earl G. (ed.), Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood, Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 2006

Kaler, Anne K., ‘”A Sister Dipped in Blood”: Satiric Inversion of the Formation Techniques of women religious in Margaret Atwood’s Novel The Handmaid’s Tale’, Christianity & Literature, Volume 38 Issue 2, 1989, pp.43-62

Kauffman, Linda, ‘Special Delivery: Twenty-first Century Epistolarity in The Handmaid’s Tale’ in Goldsmith, Elizabeth P. (ed), Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989, pp.221-244

Kray, Susan, ‘The Things Women Don’t Say’, in Westfahl, Gary and Slusser, George Edgar (eds.), Science Fiction, Canonization, Marginalization, and the Academy, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., 2002, pp. 37-49

Kumar, Krishan, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times, Oxford: Blackwell, 1987

Lim, Bliss Cua, ‘Serial Time: Bluebeard in Stepford’ in Stam, Robert and Raengo, Alessandra (eds.), Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005, pp. 163- 190

Maio, Kathi, ‘The Town Hollywood Couldn’t Forget’, Fantasy & Science Fiction, October/November 2004

Malak, Amin, ‘Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and the Dystopian Tradition’, Canadian Literature Quarterly, Issue 112, Spring 1987, pp.9-16

Matrix, Sydney, ʻ"Behind the idyllic façade, a terrible secret": Technologies of Gender and Discourses of Domesticity in The Stepford Wivesʼ, Storytelling, Washington: Winter 2007.Vol. 6, Issue 2, pp.109-120

Millett, Kate, Sexual Politics, University of Illinois Press, 2000

Moeller, Hans Bernhard and Lellis, George L., Volker Schlöndorff's Cinema: Adaptation, Politics and the Movie-appropriate, Southern Illinois University Press, 2002

88 Mohr, Dunja M., ‘The Poetic Discourse of the Split Self: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale’ in Worlds Apart? Dualism and Transgression in Contemporary Female Dystopias, London: McFarland and Company, Inc. Publishers, 2005, pp. 229-269

Montelaro, Janet J., ‘Maternity and the Ideology of Sexual Difference in The Handmaid’s Tale’, LIT, Volume 6, pp.233-256, 1995

Morrison, Sarah R., ‘Mothering Desire: The Romance Plot in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Susan Fromberg Schaeffer’s The Madness of a Seduced Woman, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Volume 19 Issue 2, 2000, pp. 315-336

Moylan, Tom, Demand the Impossible: Science fiction and the utopian imagination, London: Methuen, 1986

Moylan, Tom, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia, Oxford: Westview Press, 2000

Mulvey, Laura, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Penley Constance (ed.), Feminism and Film Theory, London: Routledge, 1988, pp.57-68

Neuman, Shirley, ‘‘Just a Backlash’: Margaret Atwood, Feminism, and The Handmaid’s Tale’, University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 75 Issue 3, pp.857-868, 2006

Paasonen, Susanna, ‘Best Wives Are Artefacts? Popular Cybernetics and Robot Women in the 1970s’ in Anu Koivunen and Susanna Paasonen (eds.), Conference proceedings for affective encounters: rethinking embodiment in feminist media studies, University of Turku, School of Art, Literature and Music, Series A, No 49, 2001

Raschke, Debrah, ‘Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: False Borders and Subtle Subversions’, LIT, Volume 6, 1995, pp.257-268

Reeder, Constance, ‘Stepford Feminism: Seen But Not Heard’, Off Our Backs, July-August 2004, pp.52-53

Rubenstein, Roberta, ‘Nature and Nurture in Dystopia: The Handmaid's Tale’, in Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms, Kathryn VanSpanckeren and Jan Garden Castro (eds.), Southern Illinois University Press, 1988, pp. 101-112

Silver, Anna Krugovoy, ‘The Cyborg Mystique: The Stepford Wives and Second Wave Feminism’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Volume 30 Issue 1/2, 2002, pp.60-76

Staels, Hilde, ‘Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale: Resistance Through Narrating’, English Studies, Volume 5, 1995, pp.455-467

Tolan, Linda, ‘Feminist Utopias and Questions of Liberty: Margaret Atwood’s

89 The Handmaid’s Tale as Critique of Second Wave Feminism’, Women: a cultural review, Volume 16 Issue 1, 2005, pp.18-32

Vint, Sheryl, ‘The New Backlash: Popular Culture’s “Marriage” with Feminism, or Love is All You Need’, Journal of Popular Television and Film, Volume 34 Issue 4, pp.161 – 168, 2007

Williams, Anne, ‘The Stepford Wives: What’s a Living Doll to Do in a Post- feminist World?’, in Brabon, Benjamin A. and Genz, Stephanie (eds.), Post- feminist Gothic: Critical Interventions in Contemporary Culture, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp.85-98

Willmott, Glenn, ‘O Say, Can You See: The Handmaid’s Tale in Novel and Film’ in York, Lorraine M. (ed.), Various Atwoods. Essays on the Later Poems, Short Fiction, and Novels, Ontario: House of Anansi Press Limited, 1995, pp.167-190

Primary Sources Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale, London: Virago Press Limited, 1987

Bradbury, Raymond, Fahrenheit 451, London: HarperCollins, 2008

Burgess, Anthony, A Clockwork Orange, London: Penguin Books, 1972

Harrison, Harry, Make Room! Make Room!, London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2004

Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World, London: Vintage, 2007

Le Guin, Ursula, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia, Harper Paperbacks, 1994

Levin, Ira, The Stepford Wives, London: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 1998

Orwell, George, 1984, London: Penguin Books, 1990

Piercy, Marge, Woman on the Edge of Time, London: The Women’s Press Limited, 1987

Russ, Joanna, The Female Man, London: The Women’s Press Limited, 1985

Zamyatin, Yevgeny, We, London: Penguin Classics, 1993

Film Reviews Adams, Derek, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale ’, Time Out: London, 1990, http://www.timeout.com/film/reviews/71666/the_handmaids_tale.html

Bartholomew, David, ‘The Stepford Wives’, Cinefantastique, Issue 4, Summer 1975, p.41

90 Kempley, Rita, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, The Washington Post, 9 March 1990

Moira: Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Review, http://www.moria.co.nz/

Sci-Fi Movie Page, http://www.scifimoviepage.com/

Winterson, Jeanette, ‘Living Dolls’, The Guardian (online), Monday 19 July 2004, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/jul/19/gender.uk

91 Filmography The Handmaid’s Tale Production details

Release date: 2 November 1990 Director: Volker Schlöndorff Screenplay: Harold Pinter Producer: Daniel Wilson Cinematography: Igor Luther Costume design: Colleen Atwood Production design: Thomas A. Walsh Editing: David Ray Music: Ryûichi Sakamoto Running time: 109 minutes

Main cast: Natasha Richardson Kate / Offred Faye Dunaway Serena Joy Aidan Quinn Nick Elizabeth McGovern Moira Victoria Tennant Aunt Lydia Robert Duvall The Commander Blanche Baker Ofglen Traci Lund Janine / Ofwarren Zoey Wilson Aunt Helena Kathryn Doby Aunt Elizabeth Reiner Schöne Luke Lucia Hartpeng Cora Karma Ibsen Riley Aunt Sara Lucile McIntyre Rita Gary Bullock Officer on Bus

92 The Stepford Wives (1975 adaptation) Production details

Release date: 12 February 1975 Director: Bryan Forbes Screenplay: William Goldman Producer: Edgar J. Scherick Cinematography: Enrique Bravo / Owen Roizman Costume design: Anna Hill Johnstone Production design: Gene Callahan Editing: Timothy Gee Music: Michael Small Running time: 115 minutes

Main cast: Katharine Ross Joanna Eberhart Paula Prentiss Bobbie Markowe Peter Masterson Walter Eberhart Nanette Newman Carol Van Sant Tina Louise Charmaine Wimpris Carol Eve Rossen Dr. Fancher William Prince Ike Mazzard Carole Mallory Kit Sunderson Toni Reid Marie Axhelm Judith Baldwin Patricia Cornell Barbara Rucker Mary Ann Stravros George Coe Claude Axhelm Franklin Cover Ed Wimpris Robert Fields Raymond Chandler Michael Higgins Mr. Cornell

93

The Stepford Wives (2004 adaptation) Production details

Release date: 30 July 2004 Director: Frank Oz Screenplay: Paul Rudnick Producer: De Line / Grunfield / Rudin / Scherick Cinematography: Rob Hahn Costume design: Ann Roth Production design: Jackson De Govia Editing: Jay Rabinowitz Music: David Arnold Running time: 93 minutes

Main cast: Nicole Kidman Joanna Eberhart Matthew Broderick Walter Kresby Bette Midler Bobbie Markowitz Glenn Close Claire Wellington Christopher Walken Mike Wellington Robert Bart Roger Bannister David Marshall Grant Jerry Harmon Jon Lovitz Dave Markowitz Dylan Hartington Pete Kresby Fallon Brooking Kimberly Kresby Faith Hill Sarah Sunderson Matt Malloy Herb Sunderson Kate Shindle Beth Peters Tom Riis Farrell Stan Peters Lorri Bagley Charmaine Van Sant

94 Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984 adaptation) Production details Release date: 10 October 1984 Director: Michael Radford Screenplay: Michael Radford Producer: Simon Perry Cinematography: Roger Deakins Costume design: Emma Porteus Production design: Allan Cameron Editing: Tom Priestley Music: Dominic Muldowney Running time: 113 minutes

A Clockwork Orange Production details Release date: 13 January 1971 Director: Stanley Kubrick Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick Producer: Stanley Kubrick Cinematography: John Alcott Costume design: Milena Canonero Production design: John Barry Editing: Bill Butler Music: Wendy Carlos Running time: 136 minutes

Production details Children of Men Release date: 22 September 2006 Director: Alfonso Cuarón Screenplay: Alfonso Cuarón / Timothy J. Sexton Producer: Marc Abraham Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki Costume design: Jany Temime Production design: Jim Clay / Geoffrey Kirkland Editing: Alfonso Cuarón / Alex Rodríguez Music: John Taverner Running time: 109 minutes

95 Fahrenheit 451 Production details Release date: 16 September 1966 Director: François Truffaut Screenplay: François Truffaut / Jean-Louis Richard Producer: Lewis M. Allen Cinematography: Nicolas Roeg Costume design: Tony Walton Production design: Syd Cain / Tony Walton Editing: Thom Noble Music: Bernard Herrman Running time: 112 minutes

Metropolis Production details Release date: 13 March 1927 (USA) Director: Fritz Lang Screenplay: Thea von Harbou Producer(s): Giorgio Moroder / Erich Pommer Cinematography: Karl Freund/Günter Rittau/Walter Ruttmann Costume design: Aenne Willkomm Music: Various Running time: 210 minutes (maximum, German premiere)

96 Appendix One: Dystopian Sub-genres

Feminist Totalitarian

Bureaucratic Cyberpunk

Tech-noir Crime

Off-world Over-population

Apocalyptic Dystopia Post-apocalyptic

Surreal Alien

Uchronian Machine

Pseudo-utopian Time travel

Leisure Capitalist

Information courtesy of the Exploring Dystopia website:http://hem.passagen.se/replikant/ edited by Niclas Hermansson, November 2003

97 Appendix Two: Text/Adaptation/Feminism Timeline

Year Category Title Author/Director Genre Main theme(s) 1900s Event First-wave feminism (continuation from nineteenth century) 1915 Text Herland Charlotte Perkins Utopia Social reform and equality Gilman 1921 Text We Yevgeny Zamyatin Dystopia Totalitarianism/communism 1927 Film Metropolis Fritz Lang Dystopia Political and social crisis through capitalism 1932 Text Brave New World Aldous Huxley Dystopia Cloning through technology 1937 Text Swastika Night Katherine Burdekin Dystopia Destruction of history 1949 Text Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell Dystopia Totalitarianism 1951 Text Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury Dystopia Destruction of literature 1956 Film 1984 Michael Anderson Dystopia Totalitarianism 1960s Event Beginning of second-wave feminism 1962 Text A Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess Dystopia Free will of the individual 1963 Text The Feminist Mystique Betty Friedan 1966 Text Make Room! Make Room! Harry Harrison Dystopia Over-population 1971 Film A Clockwork Orange Stanley Kubrick Dystopia Free will of the individual 1972 Text The Stepford Wives Ira Levin Dystopia/science fiction Female subjugation 1973 Film Soylent Green Richard Fleischer Dystopia Over-population 1974 Text The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Ursula Le Guin Utopia Resource insufficiency Utopia Totalitarianism 1974 Text(s) Walk to the End of the World (first of Suzy McKee Charnas Utopia Development of the female The Holdfast Chronicles) individual 1975 Film The Stepford Wives Bryan Forbes Dystopia/science Female subjugation fiction/horror 1975 Text The Female Man Joanna Russ Utopia Gender roles 1975 Text Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Laura Mulvey Cinema 1976 Text Woman on the Edge of Time Marge Piercy Utopia Mental deterioration of the female 1980s Event Second Wave Feminism – the “backlash” era 1984 Film Nineteen Eighty-Four Michael Radford Dystopia Totalitarianism 1985 Text The Handmaid’s Tale Margaret Atwood Dystopia Totalitarianism Religious fanaticism

98 Female subjugation 1989 Event The Montreal Massacre 1990s Event Start of Third Wave Feminism 1990 Film The Handmaid’s Tale Volker Schlöndorff Dystopia As above 1992 Text The Children of Men P. D. James Dystopia Mass infertility 2000s Event Post-feminist era 2000 Opera The Handmaid’s Tale (premiere) Poul Ruders Dystopia As above 2004 Film The Stepford Wives Frank Oz Comedy/dystopia Female subjugation Battle of the sexes 2006 Film The Children of Men Alfonso Cuarón Dystopia Mass infertility

Key Feminist utopia Feminist dystopia General dystopia Event/generic text

NB. This list is by no means exhaustive and merely serves to provide a brief summary of the seminal utopian/dystopian works and events during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

99 Appendix Three: Character Mapping

The Handmaid’s Character Status The Stepford Wives Tale Protagonist Offred Joanna Eberhart

Husband Luke Walter Eberhart (1975) Walter Kresby (2004)

Children Offred’s daughter Eberhart children: one female and one male

Matriarchal figure Serena Joy Carol Van Sant (1975) Claire Wellington (2004)

Protagonist’s best- Moira Bobbie Markowe (1975) friend and rebellious Bobbie Markowitz (2004) character Patriarchal figure Commander Dale Coba (1975) Mike Wellington (2004)

The affair/potential Nick Joanna’s ex-boyfriend, affair Raymond Chandler (1975)

The potential Ofglen Charmaine van Sant (1975) rebellious character Mental breakdown at Ofwarren (Janine) Kit Sunderson (1975) the hands of society Sarah Sunderson (2004)

Medical intervention Male doctor Female psychiatrist (1975) to “assist” the Hospitalisation (2004) protagonist Ensuring conformity Guardians The Men’s Association Eyes

Women as a Aunts Stepford wives collective force supporting patriarchal society

Domestic status Marthas Maids e.g. Nettie

100 The female protagonist

Joanna Eberhart Kate (Offred) Joanna Eberhart The Stepford Wives The Handmaid’s Tale The Stepford Wives 1975 1990 2004

The matriarch

Carol Van Sant Serena Joy Claire Wellington The Stepford Wives The Handmaid’s Tale The Stepford Wives 1975 1990 2004

The subversive/feminist

Bobbie Markowe Moira Bobbie Markowitz The Stepford Wives The Handmaid’s Tale The Stepford Wives 1975 1990 2004

Appendix Four: The Handmaid’s Tale: Hierarchy of Women

Status Colour Commanders wives Blue Wives daughters White Handmaids Red Marthas (servants) Green Aunts Khaki “Unwomen” Grey Econowives (working class) Blue/green/red striped Jezebels – “loose women” Various – customized uniforms

101 Appendix Five: The Handmaid’s Tale Film Posters

USA France

Denmark Germany 102 Appendix Six: Science-Fiction Adaptations, 1980 to Present, USA Box Office Revenues

No. of Opening No. of Date of First Rank Film Title Studio Lifetime Gross Theatres Day Gross Theatres Screening 1 Jurassic Park Uni. $357,067,947 2,566 $47,026,828 2,404 06/11/1993 2 War of the Worlds Par. $234,280,354 3,910 $64,878,725 3,908 29/06/2005 3 The Lost World: Jurassic Park Uni. $229,086,679 3,565 $72,132,785 3,281 23/05/1997 4 I, Robot Fox $144,801,023 3,494 $52,179,887 3,420 16/07/2004 5 Contact WB $100,920,329 2,314 $20,584,908 1,923 07/11/1997 6 Congo Par. $81,022,101 2,676 $24,642,539 2,649 06/09/1995 7 Jumper Fox $80,172,128 3,430 $27,354,808 3,428 14/02/2008 8 Cocoon Fox $76,113,124 1,163 $7,936,427 1,140 21/06/1985 9 The Stepford Wives Par. $59,484,742 3,057 $21,406,781 3,057 06/11/2004 10 The Time Machine DW $56,832,494 2,958 $22,610,437 2,944 03/08/2002 11 Starship Troopers Sony $54,814,377 2,971 $22,058,773 2,971 11/07/1997 12 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy BV $51,085,416 3,133 $21,103,203 3,133 29/04/2005 13 K-PAX Uni. $50,338,485 2,581 $17,215,275 2,541 26/10/2001 14 2010 MGM $40,400,657 1,213 $7,393,361 1,126 12/07/1984 15 The Running Man TriS $38,122,105 1,694 $8,117,465 1,692 13/11/1987 16 Sphere WB $37,020,277 2,814 $14,433,957 2,814 13/02/1998 17 The Mothman Prophecies SGem $35,746,370 2,331 $11,208,851 2,331 25/01/2002 18 Children of Men Uni. $35,552,383 1,524 $501,003 16 25/12/2006 19 Dreamcatcher WB $33,715,436 2,945 $15,027,423 2,945 21/03/2003 Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric 20 sheep?) WB $32,868,943 1,325 $6,150,002 1,295 25/06/1982 21 Dune Uni. $30,925,690 975 $6,025,091 915 14/12/1984 22 The Island of Dr. Moreau NL $27,663,982 2,039 $9,101,987 2,035 23/08/1996 23 Invasion of the Body Snatchers UA $24,946,533 445 $1,298,129 445 22/12/1978 24 The Iron Giant (The Iron Man) WB $23,159,305 2,179 $5,732,614 2,179 03/08/1999 25 Battlefield Earth WB $21,471,685 3,307 $11,548,898 3,307 05/12/2000 26 The Incredible Shrinking Woman Uni. $20,259,961 - $4,279,264 789 30/01/1981 27 Fire in the Sky Par. $19,885,552 1,435 $6,116,484 1,422 03/12/1993 28 Altered States WB $19,853,892 - $174,650 3 25/12/1980

103 No. of Opening No. of Date of First Rank Film Title Studio Lifetime Gross Theatres Day Gross Theatres Screening 29 The Thing (1982) (Who Goes There?) Uni. $19,629,760 910 $3,107, 897 840 25/06/1982 30 Timeline Par. $19,481,943 2,787 $8,440,629 2,787 26/11/2003 31 The Postman WB $17,626,234 2,207 $5,260,324 2,207 25/12/1997 32 Freejack (Immortality, Inc.) WB $17,129,026 1,560 $6,736,243 1,551 17/01/1992 33 Solaris Fox $14,973,382 2,406 $6,752,722 2,406 27/11/2002 34 Memoirs of an Invisible Man WB $14,358,033 1,753 $4,601,954 1,753 28/02/1992 35 The Thirteenth Floor Sony $11,916,661 1,815 $3,322,416 1,815 28/05/1999 36 Lifeforce (Space Vampires) TriS $11,603,545 1,526 $4,209,136 1,526 21/06/1985 37 Deadly Friend WB $8,988,731 1,213 $3,804,429 1,213 10/10/1986 38 The Puppet Masters BV $8,647,042 1,482 $4,069,057 1,481 21/10/1997 39 1984 Gold. $8,430,492 295 $29,897 1 14/12/1984 40 A Scanner Darkly WIP $5,501,616 263 $391,672 17 07/07/2006 41 Creator Uni. $5,349,607 820 $2,019,728 820 20/09/1985 42 Monkey Shines Orion $5,344,577 1,181 $1,902,024 1,181 29/07/1988 43 Solo (Weapon) Sony $5,107,669 1,230 $2,228,668 1,230 23/08/1996 44 The Handmaid's Tale Cinc $4,960,385 177 $738,578 117 03/09/1990 45 Communion NL $1,919,653 240 $822,123 240 11/10/1989 46 Carnosaur Conc $1,753,979 65 n/a - 21/05/1993 47 From Beyond EP $1,261,000 190 $514,417 190 24/10/1986 48 Nightflyers NCeV $1,149,470 - n/a - 23/10/1987 49 Watchers Uni. $940,173 161 $260,820 161 12/02/1998 50 Body Snatchers WB $428,868 34 $31,494 13 14/01/1994

Information courtesy of Box Office Mojo (http://boxofficemojo.com/)

104