Analyzing Literature-to-Film Adaptations

A Novelist's Exploration and Guide

Mary H. Snyder

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441196446
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de medios

The majority of scholarly treatments for film adaptation are put forth by experts on film and film analysis, thus with the focus being on film. Analyzing Literature-to-Film Adaptations looks at film adaptation from a fresh perspective, that of writer or creator of literary fiction. In her book, Snyder explores both literature and film as separate entities, detailing the analytical process of interpreting novels and short stories, as well as films. She then introduces a means to analyzing literature-to-film adaptations, drawing from the concept of intertextual comparison. Snyder writes not only from the perspective of a fiction writer but also as an instructor of writing, literature, and film adaptation. She employs the use of specific film adaptations ( Frankenstein, Children of Men, Away from Her ) to show the analytical process put into practice. Her approach to film adaptation is designed for students just beginning their academic journey but also for those students well on their way. The book also is written for high school and college instructors who teach film adaptations in the classroom.

Part One

The Creation and Study of Literature

Chapter 1

Premeditation

That’s where this story begins. Actually, that isn’t where the story in my novel began. Most stories, when written, begin somewhere in the middle of it all; it’s referred to as in media res. I began my novel somewhere towards the end of the actual story it would relate. But my story behind the novel began with “Premeditation,” the title of a short story I wrote, and with no premeditation whatsoever as to its becoming the first step towards my novel.

My history as a writer is probably unusual, or maybe simply unique. I never was known to have said that when I grew up I wanted to be a writer. I read all the time, would hide in my room at twelve years old, away from my four younger siblings, and traditionally present parents. I was the only one with my own room, since I was a girl followed by two brothers, then two sisters, so it was a haven for escape, and convenient for reading. Yet with all the reading I did, I never said to myself, wow I want to write something like this someday.

My mother tells me that in second grade my teacher told her to keep me writing, that I was very adept at creative writing. Writing did always come easily for me, but I would dread sitting down to it so much that I thought it wasn’t for me. (I didn’t know this is how writing is, but it is. The pain is in sitting down, plowing through; the ecstasy is in knowing you’ve done so.) Unfortunately, or not, I also was quite proficient in math. I performed equally well in both my verbal and math SAT scores. I excelled in academics in all subjects, got accepted early decision to a prestigious college, and off I went into the engineering program at that school. With my father guiding me, I wasn’t encouraged to think about what I loved to do (even though I wouldn’t have chosen writing at that point anyway), but rather what I was skilled at that would give me the most financial security upon graduation.

I’m providing this information because this is, and I’ve found it to be effective when done thoughtfully and purposefully, how I teach. I let my students know where I’m coming from when I’m teaching them. It opens up an environment of sharing thoughts and ideas, and in a literature and/or writing classroom, this is a necessity. I am their conduit to the knowledge I’m disseminating. They deserve to know the terrain of that conduit, so they can navigate through it in a way that is comfortable for them. Since I view you as my student, I’m explaining the terrain through which you’re moving.

I graduated from college in chemical engineering and sociology. As I continued through college, circumstances and yearnings guided me towards inputting more writing into my engineering curriculum. Basically, my dad was paying, and I had to stay in engineering because I was satisfying the requirements necessary to succeed in it. My desire for it was waning. A sociology course fascinated me, and I chose to do the five-year engineering and liberal arts program, my father agreeing so I’d stay with engineering. The writing for my sociology major, and the electives I could take, were what urged me to finish my degree with enthusiasm (I tolerated the engineering part of it).

I interviewed for a chemical engineering position in California. They liked me, but not for the job they had available. They told me I didn’t want the job, they could tell (so different from my father). They sent me to another department in the company, and I got a job as a research analyst, writing reports for companies on various technologies. I liked it and learned a lot. When I left the job to parent full-time, I immediately became bored out of my mind and started writing in a journal, then going to the library with my daughter in a Snugli, supplementing my journal writing with books I would read and then write about in my journal. This led to freelance writing, private jaunts into poetry, and even a few stabs at starting a book, all nonfiction. One was going to change the world of politics in our country.

As my life continued, several things happened to me and around me, as is the case with all of us I suppose, but I couldn’t speak about it. The words wouldn’t come. Other words would, but not the ones that reached in to release what I needed to communicate, to express myself so that others would know me and recognize me. This was when, by some strange twist of fate inside myself, I began to write fiction. I didn’t write autobiographical stories, either. I didn’t simply turn incidents in my life into “fiction.” What I did was gather up what was going on inside of me and what was going on outside of me, my reflections and observations etched quietly in the private recesses of my mind, and poured all of it out into stories. Some of them were quite awful. Some of them had potential. I see this now, but when I began, I wrote them to express myself. The only act I can compare it to is being given a bunch of tubes of oil or acrylic paints, a palette to mix them up on, and a ton of canvases, and going crazy with colors and shapes and images. Then you come to this realization that you might actually be kind of good at this, without meaning to be.

In October of 1998, I was at the height of processing a change in my life and inside myself, and couldn’t explain it to anyone. I was seeing the world through new eyes, and I was discovering all that I’d been and hidden away was free to come out, but I didn’t know how to do it. Although I was seeing the world through new eyes, the world was pretty much the same, only I was facing it head on. And in the midst of the turmoil that comes with facing the truth of a lie lived out a bit too long, I wrote the story, “Premeditation.” This is how it began, again in the middle of things:

I haven’t seen my mother in four years. I’m in the car, on my way to visit her. I’m scared. We write letters to each other. Sometimes, not too often, we talk on the phone. It’s hard to hear her voice. It reminds me of all that I’ve lost, especially her. Sometimes I send her copies of these little tapes I make, my memoir tapes. She’s the only one who knows about them. She always writes back how much she enjoys hearing my thoughts and reveries. It makes me feel good when she does.

Callie is the character who is narrating from the first person perspective. She’s going to visit her mother in prison. This is the beginning of how my novel came to be. This is also the beginning of how I came to consider myself a novelist. The story I originally wrote was 1,500 words long, so full and unfocused though that it could only be handled by the scope of a novel. I’d written a very different story the year before for a creative writing workshop, and the members of the group and instructor liked the story but critiqued its inadequacy as a short story, all agreeing that it would only work as a novel because it had too much in it to satisfy the short story genre.

In that same workshop, I expressed to the group that I didn’t know why I was there, since I wasn’t properly trained to be a writer, but that I wanted to be there. I shared my chemical engineering background apologetically. The instructor quickly corrected me, with an enthusiasm that I have to say altered my stance considerably, “Engineering is excellent training for writing a novel!” She went on about formulas, equations, and flowcharts. Interestingly, she ended up being right. When I completed my novel, and a mentor began to examine it to decide how to guide me in revision, she told me the organization of the novel was impeccable. Nothing needed to be changed there, but the crafting of it was where I needed to direct my efforts.

Another short story followed quickly behind “Premeditation,” which I entitled “Day After Night.” It begins:

I run. Faster than I thought I could. My adrenaline kicks in, on overdrive. Fear drives me, to an unknown destination I hope will be better than from where I have come. It has to be.

The narrator of this story, and main character, becomes the close friend and fellow inmate of the mother of Callie in “Premeditation.” And from there, I created my novel as it came to me, and as I came to it.

I didn’t plan to grow up to be a writer, or a novelist. I didn’t even plan to be a teacher. But that’s what happened. As Hélène Cixous encourages in her essay “Coming to Writing,” sometimes we just have to let ourselves go. And we’ll get there.

Let yourself go! Let go of everything! Lose everything! Take to the air. Take to the open sea. Take to letters. Listen: nothing is found. Nothing is lost. Everything remains to be sought. Go, fly, swim, bound, descend, cross, love the unknown, love the uncertain, love what has not yet been seen, love no one, love whom you are, whom you will be, leave yourself, shrug off the old lies, dare what you don’t dare, it is there that you will take pleasure, never make your here anywhere but there, and rejoice, rejoice in the terror, follow it where you’re afraid to go, go ahead, take the plunge, you’re on the right trail! (1991, 40)

Chapter 2

On Literary Creation

Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself . . . Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject: and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it.

(Shelley 1992, 8)

I want to be clear about literary creation. It will be important for a full understanding and appreciation of lit-to-film adaptation. Although it seems to be assumed that the literary part of the transaction that occurs in lit-to-film adaptation is understood, as a novelist, I believe it deserves more time and attention than it’s received in most lit-to-film adaptation discussions. There is no one way to write a novel, but all novelists or authors work diligently at it, and map out their own strategy for doing so. The maps might be vastly different, but they are maps nonetheless. They might be in the form of an ornate flow chart, or they could be notes on scrap pieces of paper. There’s a strategy, and there’s a process. To exemplify how complex and multiplicitous this process can be, I will discuss my own process in writing my novel. It is one of which I am intimately cognitive, although it will not be repeated when I write another novel. Even as each writer has a unique creative process, so each novel requires, and perhaps each piece of literature in circulation has required, a different literary creation process. I will detail my process for the novel that inspired the writing of this book in particular.

When I first began to take my writing seriously, I believed that the creative process came strictly from within myself. My imagination would conjure up an idea, and free-flow writing would allow my imagination to soar into a poem or short story. My naïve belief about the creative process of writing was dramatically altered when I began to write a novel. I discovered that creation does not only come from one’s imagination, and we as writers and artists do not create in a vacuum. Yet to explain the creation of a novel or any work of art proves to be a complex endeavor. Just when it seems as if the concept of creation has been captured by language and explained, the inadequacies of the explanation begin to unravel. In attempting to capture the creative process in words, one can only come close to its full dimensions, and learn to accept that there will always be facets of creation that will seem unreachable and inexplicable.

However, words are all I have to chronicle an exploration into writing, so I will try. In the following, I explore the many elements of literary creation that I encountered in writing my novel, and the influences that affected its production: imagination, lived experience, literary influences, critical analysis, strategy, cultural influences, the determination of the novel’s organization and structure, and revision.

Throughout the three years that I worked on my novel, consumed as I’d been with the conception and organization of the different elements of my work, I could well liken myself to Victor Frankenstein and the creation of his monster in Mary Shelley’s novel. He stitched together different body parts that he gathered from various sources to create a human being, the perfect human being. My monster, this novel, rendered me at times almost as obsessed as Frankenstein was with his act of creation. I worked late into the night, with a passion I had never before experienced. Frankenstein’s passion, though, grew into an unhealthy obsession:

I pursued my undertaking with unremitting ardour. My cheek had grown pale with study, and my person had become emaciated with confinement. Sometimes, on the very brink of certainty, I failed; yet still I clung to the hope which the next day or the next hour might realise. One secret which I alone possessed was the hope to which I had dedicated myself; and the moon gazed on my midnight labours, while, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding-places. (Shelley 1992, 53)

Frankenstein seemed to find creation painful; I found creation to be painfully blissful, much like giving birth to a child. I must confess, though, that when I completed the first draft of my novel, I thought I would feel a joy and immense sense of accomplishment, yet the process had been so draining, and the creation itself so overwhelming, that the novel went neglected for months upon its completion. I walked away from it, much like Frankenstein turned away from the being he had created. He was afraid of it, as he relates: “[The monster] might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped, and rushed downstairs” (57).

When a mother gives birth and holds her infant for the first time, she is elated until it begins to cry and she needs to feed it. This is the beginning of the creator’s fear — the fear that comes with responsibility for another life. I have been frightened by my own artistic hideous progeny, but while Frankenstein abandoned his creation in horror, most mothers do not abandon their children. They push beyond their fear to learn how to take care of the child. Similarly, I pushed past my apprehension about what I had created to begin to nurture it and craft it into a worthy piece of art. Trying to understand the process of creation, especially through critical analysis, helped me to continue with my writing and revision of the novel.

How does creation happen? How did my novel come to be? Just as Frankenstein’s interest in creation led him to create a human being, my interest in the creation of words and sentences, narrative, a text, a being, prompted me to write my novel. Frankenstein began with his study of and fascination with the sciences. I began with the study of Mary Wollstonecraft’s fragment, Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman, which was left unfinished at the time of her death. It is perhaps no surprise that Frankenstein should come to mind as the most immediate metaphor for my own act of creation, for not only did Wollstonecraft leave Maria behind after her death, but she also left behind a newborn. Perhaps Mary Shelley was left as a “fragment” as well after her mother’s death, and thus later pursued an understanding of creation and the consequences of neglecting that creation through the writing of Frankenstein.

My first inclination was to heal such wounds by an attempt to “complete” Wollstonecraft’s Maria. Many writers and even editors have done this with none of the qualms I developed as I thought more seriously about finishing a work that wasn’t mine to finish. Decidedly, I did not feel justified in performing this task, and instead, chose to adapt Wollstonecraft’s novel to my own, bringing the subject and a similar structure to contemporary society and writing. Thus began my novel-to-novel adaptation.

I still wasn’t sure as to how I would go about this adaptation. Once I’d decided to write my own novel, my next plan of action was to intersperse chapters of Maria, finished, with my own chapters, and interconnect them, showing how the present reflected the past. I was discouraged by a more experienced writer, a mentor, from attempting this endeavor as the product would have been too long and disjointed.

As I’ve said, my novel grew out of two short stories, each portraying two women in each story who become friends in my novel. This friendship became the driving force of the plot, in a quiet, unobtrusive manner. These two short stories that began the novel, however, played only a small role in the creation of the entire text. The text became a Frankensteinian patchwork of many different parts that led to a whole.

My final plan for my novel became, then, to write my own novel with a contemporary setting, adapting it from Wollstonecraft’s Maria, and using excerpts from Maria to enhance my own writing. In using Maria, I also desired to bring Maria into fuller view of academicians and critics. However, what began as an adaptation of Maria, as well as a combination of my work with Wollstonecraft’s work, also developed into my own quest to understand the process of creation. I intended to embark on a new way to create a novel, and in so doing, discover the many intricacies of creation, not only by writing a novel, but by studying the work of a novelist before me to more effectively and adequately adapt her story to the contemporary setting of my story. I hoped, along with my Romantic predecessor, Victor Frankenstein, to “. . . [tread] in the steps already marked, [and] . . . pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation” (Shelley 1992, 47).

What I discovered throughout this project were the infinite means available for creating a work. We as writers are often unaware of the influences affecting the creation of our texts. I mapped out a strategy for my work by outlining each chapter of the novel, proceeding in various order, and filling in the gaps as I wrote. I often consulted with objective, experienced mentors who would help me uncover gaps I had missed in my work and continue on the path to accomplishing my creation. But while I had a clearly defined strategy, my lived experience not only as a woman but predominantly as a human being, influenced my work. This included my lived experience as a student, a writer, a mother, a daughter, a friend, a woman, and a person. Yet as I was writing, and working on an analysis of Wollstonecraft’s writing as well, I encountered contemporary critics who questioned the quality of Wollstonecraft’s work using her lived experience as a weapon against her. It was an awakening for me in the twentieth century to stumble upon contemporary critics with unjust demands of women’s writing and writings. I began to find that women writers were often held up to impossible standards in their writing. If women’s lives did not reflect their writing, then their writing was considered ineffectual and inaccurate. However, if women’s writing was judged to reflect their lives too closely, it was then discredited for its lack of originality, and dismissed as autobiographical.

This is a subject I will explore in some depth, to represent t...