A Study Of The Screen Adaptation And Construction Of The Female Characters And Images In Jane Austen’s Novels

From the 1940 s to the 2020 s,Jane Austen’s novels are adapted into numerous films and television series for many times.In this dissertation,a research upon the screen construction of the female characters in Jane Austen’s novels as representations of female images,and therefore the screen transfiguration of the feminist notions embodied in the female characters,be it positive or negative,in the screen adaptations of the novels is made.With the basic presumption of Jane Austen’s being a feminist writer,this dissertation has chosen the screen adaptations of her novels as its research objects in the study of the transfiguration of female characters in literary screen adaptations.Thus,this dissertation aims mainly to discover the distortion,promotion and expansion of the feminist notions and connotations of gender equality in Austen’s novels as feminist literary works.Therefore,by taking the screen and literal texts of Pride and Prejudice,Sense and Sensibility,Mansfield Park,and Emma,the four interim works of Austen,as examples,this dissertation has examined and explored the various sorts of screen transfiguration of the female characters and transformation of feminist notions in these novels as a kind of encoding,decoding,and re-coding activities.This dissertation adopts the perspective of social gender theories,employs the feminist theories of literature and media,literary screen adaptation theories,certain theories and concepts from mass media studies,and the methodology of text analysis,comparative study and literature research,to study the propagation,promotion,construction and deconstruction of female characters in the screen adaptations from Austen’s feminist literary texts.From the perspective of Chinese researchers of screen film and television adaptations of literary works,this dissertation thus summarizes through the analyses of female characters and images in the screen adaptations the lessons to be taken and experiences to be learnt by Chinese filmographic workers from the foreign especially British examples of screen literary adaptations based on feminist literary texts.The main body of this dissertation divides into four chapters.Chapter 2 employs the theory of feminine writing to probe into how the gender factors of the screen adapters as subjective factors influence the notions of feminine writing embodied in the characters in the original texts in the adaptations.Chapter 3 discusses the exterior influences,basically the antecedent versions of screen adaptations and the cultural and ideological trends,upon the screen adaptations from the perspective of gender temperaments,namely how these exterior factors,accompanying with the gender of the adapters,impact the gender stereotypes represented in the adaptations.Chapter 4 employs concepts and theories from mass media studies to explore the power discourse relations manifested in the paradoxes and conflicts incurred between gender identities and narrative identities inside and outside the texts of the original Austen novels and the screen adaptations.This chapter further argues how gender identity,cultural and ideological identity,and narrative identity around the adaptations influence and restrict each and one other.Finally,Chapter 5,after comparing the screen adaptations of Austen’s novels and those of Eileen Chang’s Eighteenth Springs,summarizes the characteristics of Chinese and British,adaptations of female characters and images and feminist notions in feminist literary works,and emphasizes the mutual and interactive nature of reference of and between Chinese and English adapters in their screen adaptations.Finally,after the above five variants and factors influencing the female characters and images in the screen adaptations of Austen’s four novels have been summarized,the conclusion of this dissertation and the overall research is made.To adapt the gender equality notions implied in the female characters and images in feminist novels into screen successfully,must be guaranteed are the deep understanding and firm reception of feminist ideas by the adapters,and the three screen adaptation methods of “transposition”,“commentary”,and “analogy” must be employed eclectically in literary screen adaptation practices.