Kate Chopin's the Awakening: Screenplay As Interpretation

With Kate Chopin's nineteenth-century novel as her focus, Marilyn Hoder-Salmon presents a screenplay and two essays that cast light on a new way to interpret literature and to analyze writing for film. Titled Edna, after Chopin's protagonist, the three-act screenplay explores the essential themes and complexities of its source, The Awakening. Offered as criticism in itself and not for production, the script stands as a model of how adaptation alone becomes a critical method.
The first essay, unified around the theme of women's autonomy, offers background on such topics as feminist criticism, adaptation theory, masculine/ feminine themes in film, and Kate Chopin's life and the novel's particular history. The second essay interprets the screenplay in the context of the process of adaptation, illustrating how such a process both retains and enhances a work's theme in a new era. The intimate contact between the arts of film and literature uncovers ideas about character, theme, plot, setting, and point of view that resist analysis by more typical means.
Hoder-Salmon contends that adaptation draws the writer into close proximity to the mind and method of the original author. As such, it offers an exercise in creativity that becomes the ultimate step in following the current critical injunction to "enter the text" in order to unmask its mysteries.