Meu nome não é ''Offred'': um estudo sobre literatura, cinema e identidade

Abstract

"The Handmaid's Tale" is a dystopian novel written in 1985 by the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, which tells the story of the Handmaid Offred and her period of confinement in the Republic of Gilead, former United States of America. In 1990, the German director Volker Schlöndorff adapted Atwood's work to the cinema by focusing the narrative on the story of the character Kate and how she became a Handmaid within the Republic of Gilead. Together, these works may provide discussions about film adaptation, narratology, aspects of identity and the crisis suffered at national level leading at personal, as regards the characters Offred and Kate / Offred who do not get ajusted to the dictatorship in Gilead. Therefore, our main objective was to analyze how the film language adapts Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" (1985) for director Volker Schlöndorff's "The Handmaid's Tale" (1990) in what regards to identity. And the specifics goals consisted in: a) analyze the implications of the change from the point of view of the first-person narrator to the camera as narrator; b) investigate the implications of the reconstruction of the character Offred by the cinematographic language; c) verify how the crisis of national identity generated fundamentalist political movements; d) examine how national fundamentalism has generated identity crises in the characters Offred and Kate / Offred. We based our analysis through the theoretical contribution based on Hutcheon (2014), Martin (2013), Gaudreault & Jost (2009), in which regards to the theory of adaptation and cinematic language. Woodward (2014), Silva (2014), Hall (2014a, 2014b) in which regards to the questions of identity. This work was developed by the method of qualitative research. It was observed that the film character presents in its cinematographic recreation several divergences in relation to the literary character, which made possible differentiated interpretations both from the point of view of the narrator in the first person and for the camera as narrator, considering also the psychological and emotional behavior of both. In addition, the crisis of identity that opened space for the political coup that established fundamentalism in the country also caused crises of identity in the characters, but in different degrees.