The Handmaid's Tale:The Research On The Adaptation From Novel To TV Series

The novel The Handmaid's Tale by the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood(1939-)was published in 1985 and has been featured in the New York Times bestseller for three consecutive years List,and won the "Governor's Award",which is the highest literary award in Canada.The country of Gilead in the novel faces serious social problems and ecological crises.Therefore,a group of religious activists have adopted the slogan of "return to traditional values" and implemented totalitarian rule.Everyone is divided into different levels according to functions and roles,and wears the prescribed clothing.Among them,some women with reproductive functions are classified as " Handmaid's "They have been deprived of all their rights and freedoms and forced to become "fertility tools".The novel is described in the tone of" Handmaid" June.On the one hand,she talks about the persecution and threats she suffered,exposes the cruelty of the Gilead regime,and at the same time intersperses her memories of her family and friends to express her thinking about self,others and social status.In 2017,the TV Series of the same name,adapted from the novel,was released and received a good response.It won many awards such as the Emmy Award and the Golden Globe Award.This thesis takes the novels The Handmaid's Tale and the TV Series The Maid's Tale(The First Season)" as the research objects,and analyzes the narrative perspective,character image and plot structure of the TV Series,and based on the detailed study of the text and comparative analysis as the basic research method.Then analyze the adaptation of TV Series in three aspects of narrative perspective,character image and plot structure,and distinguish the gains and losses,in order to provide reference for the film and television adaptation of classic literature works in the future.The introduction summarizes the origin,significance and innovation of this article.First of all,the existing research on novels and the adaptation research of film and television versions are reviewed to provide a research basis for this article.Second,a brief overview of scholars'evaluation and research on the "adaptation" behavior,with a view to providing reference and theoretical support for the following discussion.The first chapter analyzes the change of narrative perspective.The novel uses a first-person narrative perspective,trying to present what I see and think.The TV Series uses Joan as the main character and uses the inner monologue to express the heroine's psychology.From the subjective perspective of the heroine,more of what she sees is displayed;at the same time,the TV Series describes the overall environment and main features of the drama from an omniscience perspective.The story of the character,combined with the specific scene to flexibly restore the specific description perspective in the novel.The second chapter analyzes the adaptation of characters.The main characters and minor characters in the novel are presented in the TV Series.First of all,the TV Series restores the unique character dress in the novel,displays the character's dress characteristics in visual language,and intuitively shows the one-to-one correspondence between the color and style of the costume in the novel and the character identity class.Secondly,the TV Series focuses on portraying the heroine's personality characteristics and strengthening her sense of resistance.Thirdly,other characters in the novel that are less plump and distinctive,such as Selena Joy,Jenny,Moira,Nick,etc.,are more specifically and plumply shaped in TV Seriess,which enrich and perfect their Life experiences and encounters make its image more vivid and three-dimensional.The third chapter analyzes the adaptation of the plot structure.The TV Series refines the main plot of the novel and adapts it to enhance the conflict in the drama.At the same time,the TV Series also adapts the narrative structure of the novel,using a net narrative structure to make the different plots reflect and compare with each other and strengthen the theme.However,although the narrative structure of the American TV series is clearer,it has reduced the polysemy characteristics of the novel's original consciousness narrative to some extentThe conclusion summarizes the full text and outlines the characteristics and gains and losses of the adaptation of the TV Series,in order to provide a reference for future film and television adaptation.