Hegemony and Hollywood:
A Critique of Cinematic Distortions
of Women of Color and Their Stories

ABSTRACT

An investigation of directors’ film translations of three texts written by women of color—Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, and Tina Turner’s I, Tina—explicates how marginalization and omission function as hegemonic devices to contain the women’s discourses of patriarchal resistance embedded in their writings. The struggles and triumphs over racism, sexism, and classism, and the spiritual discoveries of the women characters through their mutual friendships that are so prominent in each book, are either minimized or absent altogether in the film versions, recast in ways that absorb them "into forms compatible to the core ideological structure" (Gitlin, 1982, p. 450) of American society. The result is film texts that work ideologically to produce depoliticized melodramas, moving to the margin or muting altogether pivotal elements of the women’s discourses, while simultaneously seeming to support the ideological challenges found in the authors’ discourses.

Reacting to Bille August’s film translation of her international best seller, The House of the Spirits (1982/1986), Isabel Allende remarked that she found it difficult to relate to the film: "The fiction of the film is 10 times bigger than the fiction of the book. . . . I say this is not my movie; it is Bille August’s movie" (Simpson, 1994, p. 7).² Regarding The Color Purple (1982), Alice Walker (1996) said she had to get used to "seeing my expression taken out of context, rearranged, distorted" (p. 23) when Steven Spielberg adapted her Pulitzer-prize winning novel to film. And for Tina Turner, the pressure to streamline her autobiography (1986) into a "puff piece" for Disney resulted in her rarely visiting the set of What’s Love Got To Do With It, and not seeing the film for some time after its release (Walker, 1993, p. 5).

These complaints exemplify a primary question in adapting books to film—which parts of the original survive and which do not? Often, what is lost in such translations represents literature’s capacity to illuminate complicated and interrelated social, moral, and political issues, typically compromised by filmmakers’ sensitivity to audience desire for "fast-moving narratives, glossy settings, rich costumes, spectacle and famous faces" (Reynolds, 1993, p. 10). Some scholars have argued (e.g., Henderson, 1973/1974) that the relationship between which parts of the story are lost and which parts survive in the production process always have ideological implications. Indeed, Cheyfitz (1991) asserted that any translation is an appropriation: because of the power the translator exerts over the original author, authors and their voices may be lost, or at best become constructs of the translator. For instance, translators often represent their own ideas in the form of first-person narrative, which functions to obscure their role in creating a new story from the original. Further, in their role as translators, film directors often depict cultural views and ideals that the authors would never affirm. What is particularly problematical in this process is that the narratives of mainstream Hollywood films often function "to reproduce patriarchal order" (Cartwright & Fonoroff, 1994, p. 125). Thus, the goal of my research is to examine critically how, in the film translations of three books written by women of color—Isabel Allende’s (1982/1986) The House of the Spirits, Alice Walker’s (1982) The Color Purple, and Tina Turner’s (1986) I, Tina (1986)³—their resistance to patriarchy is contained and negated by the films’ directors, Bille August, Steven Spielberg, and Brian Gibson, respectively.

Strategies of Patriarchal Resistance and Containment

Scholarly interest in the translation of literature into film has resulted in a large body of interdisciplinary research.⁴ My study grows from insights drawn from this scholarship, as I am concerned with the ways in which film translations of stories written by women of color can be viewed in terms of the film texts’ "hegemonic devices" (Dow, 1990, p. 264) that privilege dominant ideological ideals and interests. Hegemony generally refers to "the various means through which those who support the dominant ideology in a culture are able continually to reproduce that ideology in cultural institutions and products while gaining the tacit approval of those whom the ideology oppresses" (Dow, p. 262).⁵ Thus, hegemony can be examined in terms of how power is contested and maintained in "negotiations between socioeconomic, ideological, and political forces," and one site of these negotiations is the entertainment industry (Gledhill, 1994, p. 119).

Hegemonic devices can be explicated through examining the way media texts function to contain social change by "absorbing it into forms compatible to the core ideological structure" (Gitlin, 1982, p. 450), thus giving the appearance of addressing calls for social change, while simultaneously legitimizing dominant ideologies for the viewing public. For example, Dow’s (1990) examination of The Mary Tyler Moore Show articulated the hegemonic devices that functioned to marginalize the demands for social change resulting from the women’s movement, while simultaneously encouraging viewers to perceive that these demands for women’s equality were being addressed by the television series. As Dow explained, although the central character, Mary Richards, was a single career woman, her career and single life style were represented within traditional frameworks of family and gender relationships that marginalized or negated altogether the character’s untraditional roles.

In the case of film adaptations of women’s stories, one method of documenting how mainstream Hollywood contains patriarchal challenges made by women writers, "absorbing" their challenges into "forms compatible to the core ideological structure" (Gitlin, 1982, p. 450), is to explicate the "women’s discourse" (Gledhill, 1994, p. 118) in their narratives and to compare these discourses to the texts of the films. In this context, discourse refers to the mode of enunciation characteristic in a given narrative (Chatman, 1978), and a woman’s discourse specifically resists patriarchal ideals and structures (Gledhill). The concept of a woman’s discourse is grounded in the assumption that women are socially positioned differently from men because women experience their social roles—parenthood, work, family and sexual relations, for example—in gender-specific ways (Gledhill). In turn, the different psychic and sociocultural conditions women experience "frequently contradict patriarchal construction" (Gledhill, p. 118), resulting in a woman’s voice that disrupts traditional ideological discourses, such as the discourse of anti-racism found in Isak Dinesen’s autobiography, Out of Africa (Cooper & Descutner, 1996). A variety of discourses comprise a filmic text, but since Hollywood films have been dominated by patriarchal discourses, one result of film translations of women’s stories that depict patriarchal resistance is a struggle among competing discourses.

Obviously, filmmakers must choose what to include and exclude from the literary source material, as well as what to highlight or downplay, but the result of these choices is potentially profound. The most powerful player in the process of translating novels to films is the director, who can manipulate the stories and images from the books and present them to viewers "in a context that is the director’s own" (Redding & Brownworth, 1997, p. 4).⁶ Spectators become "inextricably connected" to the director’s version and, consequently, the images and narratives depicted in films become the "text and subtext of . . . how we view the world" (Redding & Brownworth, pp. 4-5).

Recent research indicates that questionable choices are made in order to fit women’s stories to the ideological structures that dominate mainstream Hollywood films. As one example, in Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa, the parts of Isak Dinesen’s original stories that resist patriarchal and political ideals of race, gender and religion are omitted, while the parts that survive distort Dinesen’s unconventional stories in ways that reinforce patriarchy and conform to conventional American ideologies (Cooper & Descutner, 1996). The major themes of Dinesen’s autobiography were her criticisms of colonialism and her deep affection for Africa and the indigenous people she lived and worked with for nearly 20 years on her coffee farm in Kenya. The Kenyans’ pain and the European settlers’ bigotry that were major themes in Out of Africa, however, are nonexistent in Pollack’s film version, replaced with narratives that glorify rather than criticize the colonial effort and settlers. Dinesen poignantly expressed her grief over the changes the European settlers had forced on Kenyans and their culture, and her compassion for their struggles to maintain their identity and dignity. In the film, however, Dinesen is recast as one of the "offending European settlers, forcing her will on the native people without any sensitivity to their wishes or culture" (Cooper & Descutner, p. 240). Further, the compassion Dinesen expressed for the country and its people in her autobiography are appropriated by the film’s leading male character, Denys Finch Hatton. The real Finch Hatton was committed to the colonial effort, but in the film he is represented as Dinesen’s moral superior. Explaining why he changed Isak Dinesen’s story so dramatically for his film, Pollack remarked: "For film purposes, it seemed . . . [that] invention was much more economical than the facts and dramatically much better" (Luedtke & Pollack, 1987, p. x).

This metamorphosis is not limited to the case of Isak Dinesen. Analysis of the film adaptation of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple found that Walker’s story of a black woman’s evolution to self-empowerment over sexism and racism is reframed by director Spielberg, resulting in a film narrative that "imposes a patriarchal interpretation onto a significant text" (McMullen & Solomon, 1994, p. 171). Critics argue that such adaptations not only marginalize women in Hollywood, but also are emblematic of the industry’s reluctance to produce films that express diverse viewpoints. Even when women write the screenplays, they may feel pressure from producers and directors to fit their narratives and characters to prevailing patriarchal standards and traditional Hollywood conventions (Seger, 1996).

In short, there is ample evidence to suggest that people from outside the prevailing Hollywood power structure must fight an uphill battle to get their perspectives, values and voices reflected in an industry that is predominantly white and male. And although male authors such as Tom Clancy and John Irving also have complained about film adaptations of their books (Parkes, 1995; Svetkey, 1998), research indicates that women’s stories especially are altered to fit patriarchal ideals that effectively serve to marginalize women and their life experiences (Cooper & Descutner, 1996; McMullen & Solomon). While men’s stories tend to conform to the existing patriarchal structure of Hollywood, women’s stories often challenge these structures (Gledhill, 1994), and it is precisely these challenges that don’t survive the film adaptations. The implications are profound: "[T]he industry has substantial power to influence our public discussion of important social issues. This power is especially troublesome when it is exerted not according to some broad political position—liberal or conservative—but rather to silence or diminish usually marginalized voices" (McMullen & Solomon, 1994, p. 171).

Although informed by previous research, this case study expands on that work by explicating the women’s discourses in the writings of Allende, Walker, and Turner, as well as the common modes of appropriation in the film adaptations of these minority women’s stories.⁷ Specifically, I examine the directors’ depiction of the ideological challenges underlying the women’s stories, noting the clear discrepancies between the film translations and the original works to explicate the hegemonic devices embedded in the films’ texts. Thus, a comparison of the original women’s discourses in Allende’s, Walker’s, and Turner’s narratives to those found in the film adaptations suggests the questions: "What is being said about women here? Who is speaking? And for whom?" (Gledhill, 1994, p. 119).

Background of Authors

Before discussing the ideological challenges that form the major discourses of the books and the hegemonic devices used in the films to contain these challenges, it is important to provide a context for each woman’s writings. All three based their stories on personal life experiences and the experiences of their various family members and friends, constructing their narratives in ways that illustrate Gledhill’s (1994) argument that the social and cultural conditions of women’s experiences often contradict patriarchal construction and result in a woman’s discourse that resists dominant patriarchal and cultural ideologies. Allende’s and Walker’s books represent the novelization of personal and family experiences, while Turner’s is an autobiography (co-authored with Kurt Loder).⁸ The links between the books’ themes and the women’s lives are discussed next.

Isabel Allende and The House of the Spirits

Allende began The House of the Spirits (1982/1986) as a spiritual letter to her 100-year-old grandfather, who was dying in the Santiago mansion where Allende had spent much of her childhood and where she sets her novel (Fussell, 1993).⁹ For Allende, writing The House of the Spirits was "about the desire to recover everything I lost" in Chile (Boudreau, 1993, p. 1).¹⁰ Her uncle, Salvador Allende, was president of Chile and was killed during a CIA-backed military coup in 1973. The coup ended 150 years of democracy in Chile and the new dictatorship committed acts of violence and torture described by Allende in her novel.¹¹ After the coup and her uncle’s assassination, Allende’s parents escaped to Buenos Aires, where an assassination attempt was made on their lives. Allende worked with the underground movement in Chile for two years, participating in resistance activities similar to those of her Alba character in The House of the Spirits: "Finding asylum for some, safe houses for others, smuggling information out of the country" (Fussell, p. 80). When her own life was threatened, she moved her family to Venezuela, where they lived in exile for 13 years.

Allende equated her experience in writing The House of the Spirits with "slitting my wrists and letting the blood flow out" (Griggs, 1996, p. E5),¹² as many of the novel’s characters are so entwined with her life and her family that she reports she often cannot "draw a line between imagination and reality" (Fussell, 1993, p. 52). For example, Clara, the main protagonist, is patterned after her grandmother, a spiritualist who Allende described as the "crazed soul of the house" who could move ashtrays without touching them and had a three-legged table that spirits moved (Fussell, p. 80). Her grandfather, whom she said was "a very mean sort of guy" (Hernández, 1996, p. 4, http://www.abalonmagazine.com/librosyletras/5-1-98_p1.asp) who "killed everything that brought joy" (Fussell, p. 80), was the model for Esteban, but not solely in the terms of the violent, cruel nature of the book’s character. It was also her grandfather’s place in Chilean society and his reaction to her grandmother’s death—he dressed in black for eight years and painted the furniture black—that helped her develop Esteban’s character (Fussell), as well as the love she felt from her grandfather (Hernández). Nicolás, one of Clara’s twin sons in the book, is named after Allende’s own son. And Jaime, the other twin son, was based on an uncle who convinced Allende as a child that the characters in his books "escaped their pages and roamed the house at night. When the lights went off, I could hear them—bandits, courtesans, princes, witches, tyrants" (Boudreau, 1993, p. 1).¹⁰

Before becoming an author at 39, Allende was a journalist, well-known for her outspoken feminist views. Allende resented the patriarchal culture of Chile, and had "wanted to be a man since she was five years old" because, in watching her grandparents’ interactions, she realized "what a terrible disadvantage it was to be a woman. I saw how powerful my grandfather was. His wishes were orders . . . it took me a long time to accept that it’s not bad to be a woman" (Boudreau, 1993, p. 1).¹⁰ Allende said she hopes for "a world where feminine values will be validated, the same as masculine values are" ("Isabel," 1994, http://www.mojones.com/MOTHER_JONES/SO94/allende.html). She was the first female Latin American writer to criticize the patriarchal culture of Latin America and its politics in her books.¹³ Concerned that Hollywood would trivialize her novel¹⁴ (Lipman, 1994), Allende turned down several Hollywood directors before finally agreeing to allow Danish director Bille August to make the film version of The House of the Spirits (Eichinger & August, 1994).

Alice Walker and The Color Purple

In 1996, Alice Walker published The Same River Twice,¹⁵ a book detailing her experiences with seeing The Color Purple translated to a film. Originally, director Steven Spielberg commissioned Walker herself to write the screenplay from her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which she titled, Watch For Me In The Sunset (Walker, p. 60). She would not give her screenplay the same title as her book because she was afraid that Spielberg’s film version of The Color Purple (1985)¹⁶ would not deserve the name. That was never an issue, however, as Spielberg rejected Walker’s screenplay and hired Menno Meyjes to take over the film project. Not surprising, the first time Walker (1996) saw Spielberg’s (1985) final product, "everything about it seemed wrong" (p. 21).¹⁷

Like Allende, Alice Walker based many of the characters in The Color Purple on her family members and her personal experiences with them, and she describes writing her novel as "a journey to the imagined and vastly rearranged lives of my mother and father and grandparents before I was born" (Walker, 1996, p. 25). In fact, when Walker’s mother saw the film, she told her daughter that it reminded her of her life. For example, Nettie, the name she gives to Celie’s sister, is the name of Walker’s grandmother, a woman she admired a great deal. The character of Mister/Albert is based on her grandfather, whom she described as a misogynist who "unmercifully" battered her grandmother (p. 29). Despite his abusive nature, Walker loved her grandfather, and wrote that it "broke my heart that so few people were able to really see him" in Spielberg’s film (p. 34). Shug was based on one of Walker’s aunts, who moved North and worked as a domestic for whites.¹⁸ Walker, who is bisexual, often includes bisexual and lesbian relationships as themes in her books, as they are in the characters of Celie and Shug.¹⁹

Walker was the object of harsh criticism after the film’s release, especially among African Americans (Walker, 1996), who accused her of hating men, particularly black men, of degrading blacks with the dialects she used for her characters, and of being a lesbian, "as if respecting and honoring women automatically discredited anything a woman might say" (p. 22). Walker complained that is was a "rare critic who showed any compassion for, or even noted, the suffering of the women and children explored in the book, while I was called a liar for showing that black men sometimes perpetuate domestic violence" (pp. 38-39).²⁰

Tina Turner and I, Tina

While Allende’s and Walker’s novels are fictionalized narratives drawn from their lives, Tina Turner’s (née Anna Mae Bullock) 1986 book is autobiographical, detailing her childhood and her abusive relationship with Ike Turner.²¹ Her lifestory is co-authored with Kurt Loder, whose narratives link Turner’s personal stories with interviews from her friends and family members, including her former husband. Her motivation in writing her autobiography and agreeing to a film version that would publicly reveal her as a victim of extreme domestic violence during her marriage, she explained, was to find closure: "As long as I left that under the rug, it might have held me back as well" (Hamlin, 1996).²² And although Turner was unhappy with the myriad deviations the film makes from the facts of her life (Walker, 1993),²³ she avoids criticizing the people involved with the film’s production.

It took seven years, two directors, three screenwriters and 17 drafts of Kate Lanier’s screenplay for Disney to bring Turner’s story to the screen in What’s Love Got To Do With It (Chapin, Krost, & Gibson, 1993).²⁴ Howard Ashman, an Oscar-winning lyricist for Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and Little Mermaid, was the original screenwriter, but he died in 1991. Turner’s co-author Kurt Loder was then offered the job, but he declined because the producers told him they wanted the film to be "an upbeat thing. It just eluded me. I didn’t see how it could possibly be" (Walker, 1993, p. 5). Then Kate Lanier was hired to give an African American woman’s perspective. However, the film’s producers "never envisioned it as a biography. . . . The facts weren’t adding up to anything exciting," one producer explained (Chapin, cited in Walker, p. 5). Consequently, "We leave a lot out," said director Brian Gibson. And after complaints from Laurence Fishburne, who starred as Ike Turner, that Ike’s character "wasn’t fully developed," a male screenwriter was hired to "beef up Ike’s part." Explained Lanier, they wanted "a man do a man’s writing" (Walker, p. 5).

Hegemonic Devices and Film Translations of Women’s Writings

My analysis identified four ideological challenges that represent the major discourses underlying the narrative structure of each woman’s text: discourse of women’s empowerment; discourse of spiritualism; discourse of male violence; and discourse of discrimination. In each case, these discourses are developed by the women in ways that resist dominant ideologies and their institutional structures. However, two narrative strategies—marginalization and omission—operate as hegemonic devices that recast each discourse in forms compatible with conventional American ideologies in order to "contain" the radical aspects and challenges (Dow, 1990, p. 263) represented in the women’s stories. The following discussion of these discourses articulates how the women’s voices were renarrated by the directors, effectively denying the women their voices and their challenges to dominant ideologies. The result is film texts that work ideologically to produce depoliticized melodramas, moving to the margin or muting altogether pivotal elements of the women’s discourses, including their complex voices and unconventional beliefs, while simultaneously seeming to support the ideological challenges found in the authors’ discourses.

Discourse of women’s empowerment

Perhaps the most powerful discourse found in the narratives of Allende, Walker and Turner’s²⁵ stories is the empowerment that women experience through close relationships with other women. Allende writes about four generations of women who support and empower each other. The women in Walker’s novel help each other grow and provide unconditional love and support. Similarly, Turner describes the important roles various women played throughout her life—during childhood, during her marriage to Ike, amid her financial and emotional struggles after her divorce, and finally, the women who introduce her to Buddhism.

In fact, Allende dedicates her novel to women: "My mother, my grandmother, and all the extraordinary women of this story."²⁶ The House of the Spirits is the story of women who strengthen and empower each other. Throughout the novel, Clara is the uniting force of the del Valle and Truba families, even after her death. Indeed, it is Clara’s spirit that provides the book’s title. Allende’s narratives skillfully explore the interconnectiveness and complexities of female support systems. For instance, the relationships between Clara, her daughter Blanca and granddaughter Alba, and her sister-in-law Férula, are so close that her husband Esteban is peripheral to their daily lives. Despite Esteban’s attempts to become the center of Clara’s life, it is her relationships with other women she most values. In fact, Esteban becomes so jealous of Clara’s close relationship with his sister Férula that he banishes his sister from his house and all of their lives.

As another example, it is through the support and love of the women imprisoned in the concentration camp (as well as Clara’s spirit), that Alba is able to survive torture and imprisonment. Allende carefully constructs the prison narratives in such a way as to focus on the strength of the women in enduring the violent abuse they receive from their male guards. The concentration camp is less a source of pain for Alba than one of love, support and strength from other women prisoners. Indeed, the camp is depicted by Allende as another celebration of women and their female communities, as Alba explains: "The last thing I heard when I left was the chorus of my friends singing to give me courage, just as they did with all the women when they arrived or left the camp. I wept as I walked. I had been happy here" (p. 427). Significantly, it is the "solidarity among the women" characters in Allende’s novel that provide their "protection against patriarchal aggression" (Shea, 1990, p. 225).

On the surface, August’s film version seems to celebrate of the triumphs and strength of women. But Allende’s story is recast, and we see the women through the perspectives of the primary male character, Esteban Truba, not through Allende’s voice in the characters of her novel’s women. Indeed, Esteban Truba and his triumphs and strength are foregrounded, and important women characters in Allende’s story are missing from the film. The Mora sisters are omitted, as are Alba²⁷ and the women imprisoned with her. August also represents Férula’s love for Clara as perversely sexual in nature, and all of the women are depicted as relying primarily on men for their support and love rather than on women. Such portrayals deny the strength of women that is so integral to Allende’s novel, thus containing her challenges to traditional patriarchal ideals. And although Esteban is a primary character in Allende’s book, her narratives highlight the strength and empowerment of the women who must cope with his abusive nature in their lives. Strength and empowerment are also discourses of August’s film, but it is the trials, tribulations and triumphs of Esteban that are the primary focus of the film’s narrative structure.

In Walker’s The Color Purple, the empowerment and support women derive from their friendships (McMullen & Solomon, 1994) continues to be an important discourse; Celie offers herself to her stepfather in order to protect Nettie from being raped; Nettie teaches Celie to read; Mary Agnes raises Sofia’s children while she is jailed and, later, Mary Agnes has sex with her uncle (the warden) in order to get Sofia released from prison; and Sofia cares for Mary Agnes’ ill daughter while she pursues a singing career. Celie learns about herself, her African heritage, an alternative spiritualism, and eventually finds the strength to deal with her traumatic past through her friendships with women. Celie’s most important relationship in the book is with Shug. Celie admires Shug’s womanly strength and it is through Shug that Celie learns to love and respect herself and discovers her own sexual identity. And after Celie receives a telegram notifying her that Nettie’s ship has been sunk by German mines, it is Shug who goes to government offices for more details. Importantly, the friendship Celie finds with Shug frees her from the constraints of the males in her life. As Shug explains to Celie, "You have to git man off your eyeball, before you can see anything a’tall. Man corrupt everything" (p. 204).

Spielberg’s film, however, marginalizes the role of women in Celie’s life, focusing instead on developing a melodrama that highlights Mister’s role in Celie’s life and her eventual financial success within capitalism (McMullen & Solomon, 1994). Like The House of the Spirits, this movie also appears to honor women, but many important aspects of the women’s supportive friendships depicted in Walker’s novel are omitted from the film. Consider that spectators don’t learn about Mary Agnes raising Sofia’s children while she was in prison, or about her role in getting Sofia released. Both Nettie and Shug’s roles in teaching alternative spiritualism to Celie are omitted. Further, Spielberg gives Albert credit for Nettie’s safe return, ignoring Shug’s efforts. Significantly, viewers don’t learn that Celie truly discovers her lesbian sexuality through Shug, and the prominent role Shug plays in Celie’s growth and empowerment is reduced to a few scenes, including the one where spectators see Shug "seducing" Celie (McMullen & Solomon), a representation of their relationship that trivializes the loving, sexually fulfilling relationship the two women shared in Walker’s novel.

Throughout her autobiography, Turner also gives credit for her eventual empowerment to many women who befriended her, from her cousin Margaret who supported her as a child, to the women who introduced her to Buddhism, and even to women who had affairs with Ike but bonded with Tina in their mutual fear of the man: "All we had was each other" (p. 141). In fact, on her autobiography’s acknowledgment page, she thanks her women friends for their "loving friendship, financial support, and providing a haven for me and my family . . . for always being there."²⁶ In director Gibson’s version of Turner’s life, however, these women are relegated to the sidelines, and replaced with a narrative that emphasizes Ike’s relationship with Turner, and her financial triumph within a capitalist economic structure.²⁸ In fact, all of Turner’s women friends are combined into the character of one woman, Jackie, in the film, who appears in a few minor scenes. Omitting the women who formed Turner’s support system over the years silences not just Tina Turner’s voice and life story, but also the voices of all the women Turner included in her autobiography. As bell hooks (1996) observes, the film becomes a "narrative of Ike, more so than the narrative of Tina Turner" (p. 111).

In each film translation, women and their friendships are marginalized or omitted, while males and their perspectives are privileged. As hegemonic devices, these strategies recast the women’s discourses in ways that function to reinforce male dominance and heterosexuality, and minimize the power women find in their relationships with each other. As the next section demonstrates, similar hegemonic strategies are used to trivialize the value of alternative spiritualism, and simultaneously reinforce patriarchal Christian ideals.

Discourse of spiritualism

Unconventional spiritualism is an important discourse in each of the women’s narratives. Throughout each book, the development of the principal female characters’ growth and inner strength is linked to their adoption of alternative spiritual beliefs. For example, in Allende’s The House of the Spirits, Clara’s father is an atheist, her mother shuns conventional Catholicism for the spirit world, and the opening pages of the book describe how Clara’s early supernatural powers result in a local priest accusing her of being possessed. In the novel, Clara’s paranormal spiritual powers define her character: she foresees future events, she levitates objects and herself; after her death, her spirit roams her house, and she returns in spirit form to provide Alba with the inner strength she needs to survive imprisonment. And after having curbed her spiritual activities for years to appease Esteban, Clara renews her spiritualism and clairvoyance through her relationship with the Mora sisters (who later bring Alba a warning from Clara’s spirit).

Spirituality defines Clara in Allende’s novel, but this aspect of her personality is rarely shown in Bille August’s film, and further, the few scenes August includes trivialize her spiritual power. August recasts Clara’s spirituality as an aloofness and secular stubbornness that result in representing her as somewhat frivolous and silly, especially in the scenes in which she demonstrates her supernatural abilities. On her wedding night, for instance, Clara moves a table for no apparent reason, only to be reprimanded by Esteban. The Mora sisters, who figure prominently in Clara’s spiritual life, are missing. With scenes that construct her abilities as frivolous, and omissions of her paranormal power as well as Clara’s clairvoyant friends, August marginalizes the mystical power of women who adopt alternative spiritualism.

Walker, who describes herself as a "born-again pagan" (1996, p. 25), dedicates The Color Purple, "To the Spirit: Without whose assistance Neither this book Nor I Would have been Written."²⁶ So it is not surprising that, like Allende, unconventional views of religion and God as they are adopted by her women characters represent a primary discourse in The Color Purple. For example, when Celie tells Shug that she stopped praying because God is a man who never listens to "poor colored women" (pp. 199-200) and is "just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful and lowdown" (p. 199), Shug explains that it is Celie’s perception of God as a distant, old white man that makes her feel God doesn’t listen to her. All the colored people in the white man’s Bible are always "gitting cursed" (p. 202), Shug explains, and Celie needs to stop thinking of God as the "one that’s in the white folks’ white bible" (p. 201). Shug’s alternate concept of God rejects the fundamentalist views of the vengeful God of her minister father’s faith, and she tells Celie that traditional notions of Christianity have operated to suppress women and blacks (pp. 176-178).

Similarly, Nettie’s letters to Celie from Africa frequently describe the superiority of the Olinka religion, detailing the contradictory views these African people have of God and spirituality. Nettie also explains that since coming to Africa, she has learned that the pyramids were built by "colored" Egyptians, and that, "All the Ethiopians in the bible were colored" (pp. 138, 140). Nettie’s alternative views of Christianity continue:

When we examine the way the film marginalizes the alternative spirituality of the women that dominates Walker’s novel,²⁹ Spielberg’s hegemonic interpretation of the women’s spirituality seems obvious. Spielberg omitted most of the aforementioned women’s conversations and replaced the characters’ alternative religious views with a sub-plot showing Shug throughout the film trying to reconcile with her minister father and his patriarchal faith. In the book, Shug remains unapologetic for her flamboyant sexuality and lifestyle, but Spielberg invents Shug’s desperate attempt to gain her father’s approval as the movie’s climactic scene, with a "repentant" Shug reconciling with her father (McMullen and Solomon, 1994). Thus, this subplot of reconciliation with her father functions to contain the character’s patriarchal challenges, by representing religious beliefs, values and morality from a white, Christian perspective, effectively denying the alternative spiritualism so integral to Walker’s characters.

Spiritualism also is an important discourse in Tina Turner’s autobiography, I, Tina. After years of being battered by Ike, Turner credits her introduction to the Buddhist faith and her adoption of the religion’s principles into her daily life with providing her with the strength to leave the abusive marriage. Her first acknowledgment in her autobiography is to the "liturgy Nichiren Shoshu for an introduction to spiritual knowledge."²⁶ Buddhism, Turner explains later in her book, helped "rearrange her place in the universe" (p. 173) in such a way that it provided her with the inner strength to become "less and less afraid" of Ike, thus setting her "free" (p. 174).

Brian Gibson’s film, however, glosses over the significance of Buddhism in Turner’s life, including only a couple of scenes dealing with Turner’s dedication to Buddhist practices. For instance, although the movie shows her chanting in a couple of scenes, it fails to acknowledge that it is through Buddhism that Turner finds the courage to leave Ike and begin her life anew. The film downplays Turner’s spiritual awakening and the role it plays in her emotional and financial recovery in favor of highlighting Turner’s comeback career and financial success.

Just as the films recast women and their friendships, the women’s rejection of patriarchal notions of Christianity also are renarrated by the directors. The unconventional spiritual views the women embrace are shown briefly, enough to give the appearance that the filmmakers are honoring the women authors’ ideological challenges, but the films’ representation of their spirituality—through hegemonic devices of marginalization or omission—ultimately supports dominant ideologies and traditional religious values. Next, we’ll discuss how these same hegemonic strategies deny challenges Allende, Walker and Turner make in the area of male violence against women.

Discourse of male violence

An integral part of Allende’s, Walker’s and Turner’s narratives is a discourse of male violence against women.³⁰ Allende develops this discourse through Esteban, and later, through his illegitimate grandson conceived from a rape, as well as via the actions of the South American political dictators she details. Walker constructs abusive males in Celie’s stepfather, Mister, Harpo, and through Sofia’s beatings while imprisoned; and Turner describes in detail the abuse she endured from Ike.

In The House of the Spirits, Allende devotes much time to detailing Esteban’s violent nature and his cruelty to others, especially his peasant workers. Esteban rapes dozens of peasant women and young girls, siring numerous illegitimate children, and killing the native peasants who dare to confront him about his actions. He goes on rampages of anger, beating peasants and burning their huts. He beats his daughter Blanca "mercilessly, lash after lash, until the girl fell flat and rigid to the ground" (p. 199) when he discovers her relationship with Pedro, a peasant worker on his estate, and strikes Clara so hard he knocks out her front teeth when she tries to intervene. He forces Blanca into an arranged marriage when her pregnancy by Pedro is revealed, and remains emotionally distant from Blanca for most of the reminder of his life. Allende also provides vivid descriptions of the violence perpetrated on women by the ruling politicians and military personnel.

The film, however, omits virtually all of Esteban’s rage and violent acts; one rape is mentioned, one beating is included, and the scene in which Esteban confronts Blanca about her affair with Pedro is toned down significantly. For example, he does not beat Blanca, and the blows Esteban inflicts on Clara that result in her losing her front teeth are reduced to mild slaps. Blanca is not forced into a loveless marriage, nor does she remain estranged from her father, rather, they are represented as sharing a close, loving relationship. And with the exception of the depictions of the abuse Blanca receives in prison,²⁷ most of the violence of the dictatorship is omitted from the film. By significantly downplaying male violence, particularly in the character of Esteban, not only is Allende’s voice and those of her women characters diminished, but so are the accomplishments of the women who survive despite male abuse.

Men’s violence toward women also forms a major discourse of Walker’s The Color Purple, established on the first pages with Celie’s graphic descriptions of her rapes and pregnancies by her stepfather, who takes her babies while she sleeps and tells her he killed them (pp. 1-4). A few pages later, Celie tries to protect Nettie from their stepfather’s sexual assaults, asking him "to take me instead" (p. 8). And early in Walker’s novel, Celie writes about the beatings she suffers from her Pa: "He beat her today cause he say I winked at a boy in church" (p. 6). As Sofia explains, "A girl child ain’t safe in a family of men" (p. 42). Walker continues to write about the abuse Celie endures for years after being married off to Mister—"He beat me like he beat the children. . . . He say, Celie, git the belt" (p. 23)—and Harpo’s attempts to beat Sofia in order to "put her in her place" are included, as well as the assault and rape Squeak endures at the hands of her uncle.

These harsh accounts of male violence toward women are severely minimized or ignored in Spielberg’s film. Further, Spielberg invents scenes that function to downplay the significance of male violence. For instance, Spielberg’s film does not open with Celie’s rape, but instead shows Celie and Nettie playing children’s games in a field of flowers, with upbeat music in the background, thus diluting "the hopelessness of the novel’s beginning" (McMullen & Solomon, 1994, p. 119), and minimizing the trauma of Celie’s experience of incestuous rape. In a later scene, viewers see a love-sick Mister struggling unsuccessfully to cook breakfast for Shug. And as McMullen and Solomon point out, Spielberg credits Mister with bringing Nettie back to Celie. Scenes such as these are invented for the purposes of the film and direct spectators’ attention from the severity of Mister’s cruelty, a strategy Gibson also uses in What’s Love Got to Do With It.

Although she carefully avoids vilifying Ike in I, Tina, Turner does detail the abuse she endured before and during their marriage, including beatings when she was pregnant, repeated assaults with wire hangers, hot coffee thrown in her face, lighted cigarettes rammed up her nose, and cracked ribs and broken jaws. A critical part of Turner’s life story is Ike’s abuse and her inability to leave the marriage until she embraced Buddhism. Turner also details Ike’s numerous affairs with other women, which often involved bringing women to their home and sleeping with them in their bed. Like August’s depiction of Esteban and Spielberg’s portrayal of Mister, however, Gibson’s film adaptation significantly downplays Ike Turner’s violent nature. Ike is shown battering Turner only three times in the film, and never with the severity described in the book. His infidelity is virtually ignored, as are the children from these affairs, and is replaced with a couple of scenes where Ike merely flirts with other women. Indeed, bell hooks (1996) described What’s Love Got To Do With It as "a very tragic film, because you sit in the theater and you see people really identify with the character of Ike, not with the character of Tina Turner" (p. 111).

Gibson’s movie further marginalizes Ike’s abusive behavior by constructing scenes that show him in favorable terms while they distort historical facts. For example, Ike is shown playing the role of the devoted proud father after Turner has given birth to their son. In a following scene, Ike "rescues" her from the hospital, then reveals his romantic plans to drive to Mexico immediately for their wedding. Subsequent scenes show the happy newlyweds in Tijuana. In reality, however, Ike was absent from his son’s birth: "Ike was nowhere around, of course" (p. 85). And Turner was "rescued" from her hospital bed several weeks before the birth of their son, but not by Ike and not for marriage. Despite being hospitalized with severe jaundice and ordered by her physician to remain in bed for six weeks, Ike demanded Turner leave the hospital so she could continue performing on tours: "Ike sent somebody to pick me up . . . and I walked out the exit he’d told me about and out into the car and went back to the house I was renting" (p. 82). As for their later wedding, Turner describes it as an unplanned, unromantic event that she didn’t really want, but didn’t know how to avoid. The beatings had begun months before: "I didn’t want to be a part of his life, didn’t want to be another one of the five hundred women he had around him by then. But I was . . . well, scared. And by now, this was my life—where else could I go?" (p. 97).

Although a discourse of male violence is an integral part of each woman’s story, directors August, Spielberg and Gibson marginalize or omit the severity of this issue in their respective films. By including a few scenes depicting the abusive actions of the male characters, the films seem to reflect the authors’ voices and growing societal concern around domestic violence. But, the directors recast male violence into narrative forms less threatening to American culture and mythologies, narratives that actually encourage spectators to identify with the abusive males, once again demonstrating the power of marginalization and omission as hegemonic devices. A discussion of the final discourse of discrimination, explores how these hegemonic devices again contain the ideological challenges made by the women authors.

Discourse of discrimination

The insights into prejudice and discrimination expressed by Allende, Turner and Walker in their books are virtually ignored in the films. For example, Allende recounts examples of the prejudice against native peasants, and the bigotry of the wealthy families and ruling politicians toward the working classes. Indeed, the hatred Esteban initially feels for Pedro stems from Pedro’s peasant status, and although Esteban acknowledges that he sired many illegitimate children during the years he raped the peasant women working on his plantation and the neighboring plantations of his peers, he believes that none deserves his name, since they were the result of his union with lower class women. On the other hand, each of the main women characters in the book, beginning with Clara’s mother, works to improve the lives of the disadvantaged and disenfranchised. For example, Clara learns compassion for others from the trips she makes as a child with her mother to take food and clothes to people living in the slums, and develops a concern for women’s rights while accompanying her mother to factories to speak in favor of suffrage. She continues this tradition by opening her home to the less fortunate, providing them with food and shelter. Blanca works with Down’s Syndrome children. Férula devotes her life to caring for the poor after being banished from the family by Esteban. Alba takes food from her home’s pantry to feed the poor after the military coup restores power to the wealthy, and helps political dissidents escape the country.

These accounts of bigotry and oppression, and the women’s attempts to fight them are, however, minimized in the film, and Allende’s descriptions of the women’s philanthropic work are missing. We never see the women working to improve the lives of the poor, nor do viewers witness the level of disdain Esteban feels for people "beneath his class." Further, a predominately white cast portrays Allende’s South American characters, a decision by August that denies the South American experience. All of the main characters—the rich and the powerful—are played by white actors: Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Winona Ryder and Jeremy Irons; the only exception is Antonio Banderas, a Spaniard who stars as the peasant Pedro. Indeed, even Allende was "surprised that (August) chose such an Anglo-looking cast. Everybody is so blond" (Simpson, 1994, p. 7)²

The Color Purple addresses a range of issues related to racial discrimination. Walker tells about Celie’s biological father’s being lynched by white men. Nettie explains that on her train ride to New York City, "Only white people can ride in the beds and use the restaurant. And they have different toilets from colored" (p. 141). Later, Nettie writes lengthy letters to Celie in which she describes the bigotry of the white men who are colonizing Africa. In one letter, Nettie explains how the white settlers became angry when a black man’s store was taking their business, and in retaliation, the white settlers burned down the store and hanged the black man and his two brothers (pp. 180-181). In another instance, Nettie writes about her concerns for Celie’s children when they return to America because of the country’s "hatred of black people" (p. 265).

Walker also describes the abuse Sofia endured during her imprisonment simply because she is black:

Through omission and marginalization, Spielberg’s film downplays the very racial issues Walker foregrounds in her novel (McMullen & Solomon, 1994). The details of Celie’s father’s lynching are missing, as are most of the details about white racism in America and Nettie’s experiences with white colonialism in Africa. Spielberg’s depiction of Miz Millie is more frivolous—she’s a comical character—and far less bigoted than Walker’s, thus diluting the impact of the white South’s bigotry. And similar to August’s selection of a predominately white cast to portray Allende’s South American characters, the actors Spielberg chose for his film often do not match how Walker envisioned her characters. For example, in her notes to her screenplay Walker (1996) wrote that although she was pleased with Margaret Avery’s portrayal of Shug in the film, she envisioned this character’s physical appearance very differently from the thin, lighter-skinned Avery. Walker saw Shug as resembling Pearl Bailey, a very dark-skinned, stout woman who reminded her of her aunt, and thus matched her descriptions of Shug in her book: skin as "black as my shoe" and with "lips look like black plum" (Walker, 1982, pp. 21, 48). Walker explained that she purposely depicted Shug as very dark-skinned, because until "stage shows and early movies produced by whites . . . began to use ‘high yellow’ women exclusively in their cabaret and stage dance scenes," dark-skinned women were valued as much as lighter-skinned women by African American men (Walker, 1996, p. 41).

Although racial discrimination is not a major discourse in her book, Turner nonetheless does talk about the racism she experienced, not only growing up, but in the clubs where she and Ike performed. Recalling her childhood in Tennessee, Turner writes: "There was also the segregation, of course. . . . the blacks ‘knew their place,’ right?. . . And you always went to the back. That was the way it was. And yes, always a tinge of fear" (p. 9). When she began touring with Ike, racism continued to be a problem, particularly in the South, a fact of her life that led to her preference for European tours. In the film version, however, there is a complete absence of racial strife, discrimination or prejudice. The film even ignores the fact that Tina Turner preferred performing in Europe, where she lives today, because the European audiences were more receptive to black performers than audiences in the United States.

Just as each film marginalizes women and their friendships, alternative spiritualism, and male violence, the movies minimize issues of racism and classism as well. Throughout The House of the Spirits and The Color Purple, racial and class strife are present, but in ways that contain rather than resist dominant ideological ideals and institutions; they’re missing entirely in What’s Love Got To Do With It. Through the use of omission and marginalization, each director’s film presents spectators with "tranquilizing American mythologies" (McMullen & Solomon, 1994, p. 172) that negate the challenges to dominant racial and classist ideologies embedded in the women’s discourses.

Implications

The discourses that form the narrative structures of the stories by Isabel Allende (1982/1986), Alice Walker (1982), and Tina Turner (1986) not only celebrate the strengths and triumphs of women of color and the power of friendships among these women, but also resist dominant ideologies concerning gender, race, class and spirituality, with the women in each book depicted as positive forces for social and political change. Indeed, the authors’ narratives celebrate women’s triumphs over patriarchy, exemplified in this quote from Allende’s Alba as she reflects on her fellow prisoners at the concentration camp: "I understood that the days of Colonel Garcia and all those like him are numbered, because they have not been able to destroy the spirit of these women" (p. 429).

These kinds of struggles and triumphs over racism, classism and sexism, and the spiritual discoveries of the women characters through their mutual friendships that are so prominent in each book, are either minimized or absent altogether in the film versions. Through marginalization and omission, the women’s discourses are recast in ways that absorb them "into forms compatible to the core ideological structure" (Gitlin, 1982, p. 450) of American society, thus diluting their impact at the same time as the films seem to confront the issues and their consequences. One reason these challenges to dominant ideologies are lost in the film translations surely has to do, as Carolyn Anderson (1988) remarked, with "the problems of adapting an alternative literary voice to the conventionality of mainstream moviemaking" (p. 116). However, Michael Real (1996) asserted that: "Few cultural institutions have been as powerful and as exclusively male-dominated as classic Hollywood. . . . The world of film, owned and directed by men, has undervalued and marginalized women. The male gaze of old Hollywood, from behind the camera and in the audience, objectifies and fetishizes women, leaving them mute and voiceless" (pp. 181, 201). Similarly, scholars such as Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams (1984) argued that films operate ideologically to accomplish "the repression of women in patriarchal culture" (p. 8), especially strong, independent women who imperil the stability of the patriarchal order. These tendencies clearly are at work in the cases of these three films.

This comparison of the original narratives and their respective film adaptations illustrates how directors Bille August, Steven Spielberg and Brian Gibson effect the patriarchal containment of Isabel Allende, Alice Walker and Tina Turner, respectively. The directors violate the stories and the unconventional discourses of the women’s narratives, diminishing the significance of the women’s empowerment, as well as their accounts of racism, classism and alternative spiritualism. Likewise, they replace the women’s discourses with ones more acceptable to the traditional characteristics of women, race, class and religion in mainstream Hollywood films, and thus, "the narrative of the female prove[s] to be the narrative of the male" (Dittmar, 1986, p. 80). Central to this argument is that, in each instance, the directors’ choices work ideologically to contain the complex voices of the women authors. In other words, these film translations of the women’s stories reflect hegemonic interpretations to the extent that the ideological ideals organizing the films’ texts direct spectators’ attention away from the women’s discourses of gender, racial and class inequities, and unconventional religious beliefs, and, in turn, actually legitimize for spectators the very ideals the authors themselves rejected.

Just as significant is that, as translators, August, Spielberg and Gibson present spectators with scenes that redefined and falsified the female characters—an ideological "make-over" of both characters and their ideas in their transition from the original to the Hollywood. Like Dinesen’s stories in Out of Africa (Cooper & Descutner, 1996), Allende’s, Walker’s and Turner’s original discourses resist and subvert the constraints of dominant ideologies. But the three directors’ translations, like Sydney Pollack’s translation of Dinesen’s autobiography (Cooper & Descutner), reaffirm existing power structures, and thus represent the co-optation of the women’s stories. Admittedly guided by commercial considerations, the directors insured that audience expectations would not be challenged by privileging in their films only dominant cultural ideologies and traditional notions of Christianity, which would not threaten Hollywood’s conception of the hegemonic idealized image of American society in terms of gender, race, class and religion. Further, these translations demonstrate the semiotic power of film as cultural texts to construct meanings for significant societal issues (Fiske, 1987; Dow, 1990, Gitlin, 1982) and accordingly, the potential of film narratives and images to become the "text and subtext of . . . how we view the world" (Redding & Brownworth, 1997, pp. 4-5). As Hall (1981) observed: "[T]he media are not only a powerful source of ideas about race [and gender, class and religion]. . . . They are also one place where these ideas are articulated, worked on, transformed and elaborated" (p. 35).

My conclusions are not meant to suggest that August, Spielberg or Gibson intended to marginalize the voices of Allende, Walker and Turner, nor is it likely that they purposely imposed a "patriarchal interpretation" (McMullen & Solomon, 1994, p. 171) on the women’s texts. And certainly I’m not suggesting that some vast conspiracy to silence women’s voices controls Hollywood. Rather, in their representations of these women’s stories, August, Spielberg and Gibson chose the tried and "safe" path—to honor cinematic conventions and affirm familiar cultural myths rather than to confront the more emotionally charged and unconventional depictions that structure the discourses in these women’s writings. Unfortunately, this practice is not limited to film directors, as researchers have demonstrated how journalists’ reliance an "common sense" myths to report news events dealing with race, for example, "impose cultural understandings that feed a hegemonic consensus about American society," (Campbell, 1995, pp. 12-13), thus contributing to the dominant "social order that dictates who participates and who doesn’t" (Campbell, p. 15). Further, Campbell argued that the "most dangerous (and the most common) myths may be those the reflect white, middle and upper-class notions of society and impede multicultural understanding and interpretation" (p. 12). It is precisely the type of "common sense" myths these directors used that resulted in their appropriation of the women’s unconventional stories. Despite the best intentions these directors surely had when they adapted the women’s novels to films, their reliance on "comforting familiar narrative" and "tranquilizing American mythologies" (McMullen & Solomon, 1994, p. 172) to appeal to spectators’ desires and to attract the largest audiences, has profound implications that reach far beyond the box-office: each film perpetuated myths that "preclude the kind of understanding that is necessary to attain the tolerance and compassion that must precede the elimination" of discrimination and prejudice in America (Campbell, p. 132). As Gorham (1995) argued in his reference the Barthes’ articulation of myths and their power, "Those who are in a dominant social position have the power to define the dominant understandings, and thus have tremendous ability to make their definitions appear natural and unarguable" (1995, p. 4).

It is important to note that in Alice Walker’s own screenplay adaptation of The Color Purple (1996), which Spielberg rejected, the women’s empowering friendships and their triumphs over racism, sexism and male violence are not marginalized or omitted. The very discourses of Walker’s novel that Spielberg negated form the film text of her adaptation: Celie and Shug’s lesbian relationship remains intact,³¹ as does the women’s support for each other; Shug remains unapologetic for her chosen lifestyle. The discourses of violence and racism are foregrounded in Walker’s version, and alternative spiritualism is celebrated, not ignored. In other words, when women authors translate their own stories to film, women and their value systems are more likely to remain the focus. As Caryl Rivers said: "It is only when women fashion their own stories, set their own agendas and tell truths about their own lives that women will be seen clearly" (1993, p. 17). Of course, there is no guarantee that a woman director or screenwriter would translate women’s discourses of patriarchal resistance any differently from the prevailing Hollywood standard. Film director Martha Coolidge asserted, however, that "until women are in significant numbers in the industry, we won’t see a difference in the kind of films being made or a lot of understanding of women’s plight" (cited in Infusino, 1991, p. E4).

My case study has focused on both the strategic choices directors made in translating these women’s texts into film versions, and the ways in which those choices can be read critically as strategies to contain any challenges to dominant ideologies and norms. The three directors fundamentally misrepresent the views, emphases, and personal visions that animate the women’s writings. Few films show women—of any color—succeeding on their own, focusing on their strengths or the strength of women’s community, a point Walker (1996) lamented when she wrote:

It was painful to realize that many men rarely consider reading what women write, or bother to listen to what women are saying about how we feel. How we perceive life. How we think things should be. That they cannot honor our struggles or our pain. That they see our stories as meaningless to them, or assume they are absent from them, distorted. Or think they must have control over our expressions. And us. (p. 39)

Notes

¹ Rivers (1993, p. 17).

² Simpson’s article can be retrieved on-line from the Los Angles Times archives: http://www.LaTimes.com. The LA Times charges to print on-line articles.

³ I selected these three books and films for my study because each woman’s book was autobiographical in nature, and challenged dominant cultural ideologies. Additionally, although voices and images of people of color are marginalized in Hollywood films, The Color Purple and What’s Love Got To Do With were major Hollywood productions, thus widely perpetuating specific images of the women authors and their political, moral and personal beliefs. And although The House of the Spirits did not experience similar box-office profits as the other two movies, the well known celebrities stars—Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons, Glenn Close, Wynona Ryder, and Antonio Banderas—enhanced the film’s potential resonance for spectators.

⁴ See for example: Anderson, 1988; Aycock & Schoenecke, 1988; Cooper & Descutner, 1996; Fried, 1987; Giddings, Selby, & Wensley, 1990; MacKay, 1985; Mayne, 1988; McMullen & Solomon, 1994; Orr, 1985; Richardson, 1969; Sinyard, 1986.

⁵ See for example, Barthes (1973); Fiske, (1986; 1987); Gitlin (1982); Gramsci (1971); Hanke, (1990); and, Storey (1993).

⁶ Although screenwriters play important roles in translating books to film versions, ultimately, directors have control of the films and the final cut, and it is their visions that dictate what is included or omitted in the scripts (Redding & Brownworth, 1997).

⁷ Neither Cooper and Descutner’s (1996) analysis of the film translation of Dinesen’s Out of Africa nor McMullen & Solomon’s (1994) analysis of Spielberg’s translation of Walker’s The Color Purple addresses the use of hegemonic devices as strategies to contain resistance to dominant ideologies embedded in women’s discourses.

⁸ Loder’s contribution to the book primarily involves interviews with people who knew Turner, and providing historical context to the events of Turner’s life as she describes them in her own words.

⁹ For a synopsis of Allende’s The House of the Spirits, the influence of feminism in her writings, and links to her other novels, check: http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Allende.html.

¹⁰ Boudreau’s article can be retrieved on-line from the Los Angles Times archives: http://www.LaTimes.com. The LA Times charges to print on-line articles.

¹¹ Two short biographies of Allende include links to other sites discussing her assassinated uncle, Salvador Allende, and Chilean politics: http://encarta.msn.com/index/concise/0VOL14/026ca000.asp; and, http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Allende.html. Allende has a personal web site that also includes background information about her as well as some additional interesting links: http://www.isabelallende.com.

¹² Grigg’s article can be retrieved on-line from the Salt Lake Tribune’s archives: http://www.sltrib.com; or, http://archive1.sltrib.com/cgi-bin/om_isapi.dll?

¹³ For more information about Latin American women’s writing and feminism, see two cites from "Contemporary Women’s Issues," a full text subscription database (www1.xls.com/cgi-bin/cwisuite.exe): Berta Broncano (1998) reviews Latin American Women’s Writing: Feminist Readings in Theory and Crisis (Jones & Davies, 1996) for the Journal of Gender Studies. Janet Gold (1997) reviews three relevant books for NWSA Journal: An Annotated Bibliography of Hispanic Feminist Criticism (Charon-Deutsch, 1994); Latin American Women Writers: Class, Race, and Gender (Jehenson, 1995); and, Lesbian Voices from Latin American: Breaking Ground (Martinez, 1996). Both reviewers discuss Allende’s works in the context of a canon of Latin American women writers articulated by marginalized women who challenge and resist the patriarchal structures that defined their lives and their cultures.

¹⁴ An interview with Allende in which she discusses her Latin American background and her approach to writing is included in the "Common Ground" web site: http://www.comngrnd.com/allende.html.

¹⁵ For reviews of The Same River Twice, see: http://www.bookwire.com?HMR/nonfiction/read.Review$1696; and, http://www.metroactive.com/papers/sonoma/02.15.96/walker-9607.html.

¹⁶ For a synopsis of The Color Purple, see: http://educeth.ethz.ch/english/readinglist/walker,alice.html.

¹⁷ Discussions of Walker’s reactions to Spielberg’s film adaptation of The Color Purple are found in the following locations:
http://beacon-www.asa.utk.edu/issues/v71/n50/walker.50n.html; and, http://www.salon1999.com/09/departments/litchat1.html. An article in the Detroit News by Deb Price (1996) includes numerous quotations from Walker in which she discusses her reactions to the film adaptation: http://detnews.com/menu/stories/38029.htm.

¹⁸ The following include biographical information about Alice Walker: http://wwwvms.utexas.edu/~melindaj/bio.html; "Writing & Resistance" —http://www.public.asu.edu/~metro/aflit/walker/bio.html (includes links to several other sites with information about Alice Walker, including a listing for almost 300 research critiques of Walker and her work); and, http://www-engl.cla.umn.edu/lkd/vfg/Authors/AliceWalker (also includes several links to additional information about Alice Walker).

¹⁹ For an extensive listing of web sources related to Walker and her works, see: http://ucl.broward.cc.fl.us/writers/walker.htm.

²⁰ A short interview in which Walker discusses her reactions to criticism from the African American community is found at: http://www.salon1999.com/09/departments/litchat2.html.

²¹ Biographical articles on Tina Turner can be found on-line: http://www.privateissue.com/private/data/tinabiography.htm. An extended biography in the Philadelphia Tribune (Sherman, 1998) is available from the subscription database, "Ethnic News Watch," http://softlineweb.com/softlineweb/ethnic.htm.

²² Turner discusses her marriage to Ike, her career, and her current life in Europe in an interview with Lynn Norment (1996) in Ebony magazine, available on the subscription database, "INFOTRAC."

²³ Walker’s article can be retrieved on-line from the Los Angles Times archives: http://www.LaTimes.com. The LA Times charges to print on-line articles.

²⁴ For a review of What’s Love Got To Do With It in the Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, see: http://www.albany.edu/scj/jcjpc/vol3is3/love.html.

²⁵ In this section, no years or names will be cited after references to citations from Allende’s, Walker’s or Turner’s books, nor after references to the films.

²⁶ The acknowledgment pages in the three books are not numbered.

²⁷ Alba is omitted from the film, and the events of Blanca and Alba’s lives are combined into the character of Blanca, who is imprisoned when the dictatorship is restored.

²⁸ Although an African American woman, Kate Lanier, was the primary screenwriter for What’s Love Got To Do With It, as stated earlier, women screenwriters may feel pressure from producers and directors to fit their narratives to prevailing dominant ideologies and traditional Hollywood conventions (Seger, 1996). Based on the comments cited earlier from this film’s producers and director (Walker, 1993), it seems reasonable to assume that Lanier felt such pressures.

²⁹ Walker (1997) discusses her alternative spirituality in an article published in On The Issues that can be retrieved from "Contemporary Women’s Issues," a full text subscription database (www1.xls.com/cgi-bin/cwisuite.exe).

³⁰ A review of A Hunger for Language (Sapphire, 1996) discussing how women use writing to recover from adolescent trauma (Pemberton, 1996) is available through "Contemporary Women’s Issues," a full text subscription database (www1.xls.com/cgi-bin/cwisuite.exe).

³¹ An article in Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review (Forrest, 1996) discussing the development of lesbian themes and fiction is available through "Contemporary Women’s Issues," a full text subscription database (www1.xls.com/cgi-bin/cwisuite.exe).

References

Allende, I. (1986). The house of the spirits (M. Bogin, Trans.). New York: Bantam Books. (Original work published 1982).

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Brenda Cooper is Director of Women’s Studies and Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Utah State University. She thanks David Descutner and Edward C. Pease for their insights, Tyrone Adams and the reviewers of ACJ, and the students from her Women and Film classes whose enthusiasm inspired her research.