RECLAIMING THE GAZE: FEMINIST RE-VISIONING IN ATWOOD’S AND POLLEY’S ALIAS GRACE
Keywords:
Adaptation Studies, Female Agency, Feminist Film Theory, Narrative Control, The GazeAbstract
This paper examines the implications of feminist film theory for both Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace (1996) and Sarah Polley’s Netflix miniseries Alias Grace (2017), with a focus on the relationship between the gaze, gender, and narrative control. Based on the theoretical frameworks of Laura Mulvey, Bell Hooks, and Judith Butler, this paper challenges the patriarchal modes of spectatorship and the retrieval of the female gaze by aligning cinematic gaze techniques with the consciousness of the protagonist, Grace Marks. The research posits that Polley adapts the metafictional critique of historiography made by Atwood into a visual rhetoric of feminist reclaiming, with the female subject no longer the passive object of interpretation as the writer of her own narrative, comprising fragmented and resistant pieces. In a discussion about visual style, narrative fragmentation, and embodied metaphors like sewing and silence, Alias Grace comes out as an intertextual dialogue between the series and the novel that confronts the patriarchal gaze. This work eventually reveals how feminist adaptation challenges the meaning of authorship, spectatorship and historical memory in the modern visual cultural environment.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Maham Akram , Khadija Ramzan , Dr Katsiaryna Hurbik (Author)
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