Adapting Women: Revision and Survival in Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison's Works and Their Dramatisations

In The Storytelling Animal (2012) Jonathan Gottschall emphasises the centrality of stories in the daily existence of every human being. Stories touch every aspect of our lives as we use them not only to entertain us but also to make order in our past and present and to imagine our future. Stories are often retold and rewritten in different forms over time responding to different contexts; these repetitions, or adaptations, allow narratives to survive the passing of time and expand their meanings through artistic variations, new interpretations or subversive rewritings. Drawing from the fields of Adaptation Studies and Trauma Studies, my thesis explores in particular the necessity of considering adaptation and storytelling as effective practices of political resistance and survival. I interrogate more specifically this idea by
considering selected works by Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison – Beloved (1987), Alias Grace (1996), The Bluest Eye (1970) and The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) – and their dramatisations. By focusing on four different metaphors central to each of the selected novels and their adaptations – water, quilts, seeds and mirrors/reflective surfaces – I argue that these stories, reconstructed in different forms (novels, films, TV series, operas, theatre and radio plays) and through different interpretations, show how retelling is a complex interaction whereby texts communicate and influence one another, creating temporal, spatial and cultural shifts and exchanges across genres and media. In particular, I analyse the use of narratives and storytelling in these works as an effective instrument for both the authors and their key characters to come to terms with past and present traumatic events, such as gendered or racist physical and psychological violence, slavery, or rape. Storytelling is thus central to the texts under review here and to my overall argument: creating and witnessing art, specially adaptation, allows us to investigate the past, understand the present, and prepare for the future.