2002, Vol.15, No.2

Journal of Modern English Drama 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.11

pISSN : 1226-3397
https://journal.kci.go.kr/medak

This paper has arisen from a recognition that storytelling in Old Times is used to foreground the process of reality construction. By telling a story, the shared past is changed and reproduced according to the three characters’ wishes. With narrative there is a radical change of the character’s fate as can be seen in the death of Anna and Deeley in Kate’s story. In this way, the self-reflexive space of the narrative performance is theatricalized in Old Times. It is Kate who dramatizes her desire to be the self by fictionalizing Anna as to represent her repressed desire to be a writer, and by positioning Deeley as the stage audience. While the narrative continues, the competitive relationships between the teller and the hearer are concentrated into those between the lovers. Like the sexual relationship, the narrative relationship between Anna and Deeley is built in the way in which a teller seduces audience to control audience reaction by creating erotic narrative. Maclean’s erotic narrative model helps in giving account of the essentially dynamic and sexual nature of narrative performance. Kate’s self-theatricalization allows Anna and Deeley to project their own desires for the narrative subjects by seducing the other. As being characteristic in performance, Kate is simultaneously producer and observer. Kate is the producer, who dramatizes the narrative of desire through which the narrator tries to communicate his or her own text of creation. She is audience who watches the narrative performance in which her own desire for the authorship is reflected. Kate’s self-dramatization shows that the performance of desire is actually itself a narrative of lack, revealing a deep unconscious lack which underlies desire. The three characters’ ongoing efforts to reconstruct the past can be seen as the traces of the unconscious drives which are the source of desire.

Stage plays are frequently thought to lend themselves to film adaptations more easily than novels because the two forms have conceptual and physical properties in common. Both have similar dramatic structure. Both utilize actors carrying forth dramatic actions. Both make use of spoken dialogue. But adaptations of superb and popular stage plays to film have frequently been a great appointment because there are perceptual differences between the two forms. The resemblance between theatre and cinema is superficial and deceptive, and the nature of the resemblance is such as to make the adaptation of a stage play to film far more difficult, in many ways, than the adaptation of a play. For the full appreciation of any successful adaptation of a stage play to film will require that we understand what common elements of these two deceptively similar art forms will lend themselves to a change of medium, what elements will require a change in the mode of expression, and what will need to be eliminated. The elements we must be concerned with are dramatic structure, characterization, physical media differences, real time and cinematic time, dialogue exposition, actors and acting techniques and the spirit of the original play.

Hedda Gabler, as one of Ibsen’s later plays, has often been judged in the context of his earlier realistic plays. The attentions used to fall upon the new woman in content, and the well-made play in form. The approach to Hedda Gabler based on the criteria of early realism results in missing its underlying meaning, because Hedda Gabler is somewhat different from its predecessors. Ibsen constructs a complex play in Hedda Gabler, seeking after Inner Reality, the characteristic of Modernism, as well as Outer Reality. Under the text of Hedda Gabler, Ibsen weaves a subtext, “concealed” or “unspoken” text which centers around the absent characters or offstage characters. The subtext gives aid to the fine building of Hedda Gabler. Aunt Rina, an unseen invalid helplessly lying on bed offstage, stands for a typical “motherly figure” which Hedda abhors. She, however, gives an influence to Tesman, in an unknown way to Hedda, which hints a primordial life force ironically. So, the death of Aunt Rina entails the death of Hedda. Diana, a prostitute, plays the part of a connecting tissue to complete the symmetry of a male-female structure. She functions as substitute for the unavailable Hedda. Psychologically she is a surrogate- self of Hedda, an embodiment of Hedda’s repressed desire. General Gabler, absent as he is, both begins and ends this play, as the portrait and the pistols which are metonymic substitutions for him. The heredity and the environment he has sown determines Hedda’s ways of thinking and behavior. The absent father in modern drama, symbolizes the Death of God, as it were, the loss of an absolute standard.