Redefining Gender through Adaptations: A Study of A Streetcar Named Desire and Elia Kazan s Adaptation

Directors from different cultural and historical milieus have adapted Tennessee Williams’s plays into movies. Elia Kazan is among the first directors who adapted A Streetcar Named Desire in 1951 for the American cinema. Kazan’s film adaptation has been almost faithful to the original manuscript by sticking to Williams’s words and sentences. However, even if one ignores the cultural and historical contexts, he cannot disregard the alterations that happen in the process of trans-mediation where the telling mode in the text changes to the showing mode in the media. With this hypothetical basis, this study aims to detect the possible alterations in the adaptation of the play to examine gender roles in both texts. Using the ideas of Linda Hutcheon gleaned from her famous book, A Theory of Adaptation (2006), the authors have studied the verbal signs in the play together with the verbal and visual codes in the movie so as to see how the film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire has incorporated the ideas of femininity, the ideas which are the main concerns of the play, too. The results of the study suggest that the alterations from the written text to media have had proportionate effects on the formation of the female identity. To know about these alterations in the adaptation film and their effects on the identity formation of the characters will help better understand and appreciate the two works.