Ideological inversion in the cinematic adaptations of 'Memories of Underdevelopment' and 'Wide Sargasso Sea': A study based on narratology and adaptation theory from a postcolonial, feminist perspective.

摘要

This dissertation contributes to the academic critical analysis of literary-to-film adaptations in the Caribbean, a field of study in its incipient stages. The text focuses on two films based on novels from Cuba and Dominica. A close reading of the cinematic adaptation processes of Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) by Cuban filmmaker Tomas Gutierrez Alea, based on the homonymous novel by Cuban author Edmundo Desnoes (1965), and Wide Sargasso Sea (1993), by Australian/British director John Duigan, adapted from the novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) by Jean Rhys, born in the island of Dominica. The interdisciplinary analysis of these two adaptations is informed by a postcolonial, Third World feminist perspective and takes into consideration three major theoretical frameworks. These are: adaptation theory, in its intersection with narratology; theory of representation that consider the intersection of race, class, sexuality and gender power relations (engaged with the debated field of ideology and its relation to representation); a constructionist approach to literary and filmic discourse and a semiotic reading of signifying practices. The fundamental contention is that the central operation taking place in both adaptation processes studied here is ideological inversion of the source text, understanding ideology as a way of seeing, an epistemology. In Gutierrez Alea's adaptation epistemological and ontological shifts are performed through the dominant presence of history, in the form of a variety of Cuban and Latin American cinematic, literary and oral intertexts and by constructing a double focalization engaged in a polyphonic, hidden polemic. The proto-postcolonial and proto-feminist, focalization in Jean Rhys's novel Wide Sargasso Sea, which instantiates an oppositional stance against British patriarchal colonialism, is inverted by the masculinist and Eurocentric worldview of the English Husband, the cinematic protagonist. Contending that the filmic ideological inversion takes place through aesthetic devices such as focalization and various intertextual strategies is based on the premise that narratological procedures are connected to the construction of ideological fields. Regarding adaptation as a palimpsest in which intertextual surfaces interact, mediated by time and geography, contests fidelity criticism as the literary source is only one of the intertextual roots present in the film.