Oleanna Adapted To A Film

This last week in class, we watched the Oleanna film adaptation, and I'll be the first to say that I loved it. To be quite frank, I really hated the play. I found that the weird pacing and the constant interruptions bugged me, and that I couldn't get the tone from the text. I did enjoy some of the themes, but the fact that it was all dialogue made it too hard to visualise in my mind.

This all changed when I watched the film. Firstly, I think that the two actors played the characters of John and Carol really well. William H. Macy, the man who played John, is a personal favourite of mine (he's played parts in some of my favourite films) and while it scared me the role that he played in this, I think he did a fantastic job in portraying John. I believe that the actress that played Carol did a phenomenal job of portraying Carol, even if she did make me hate her, even more.

The fact that this was a film helped to change the fact that I couldn't visualise anything. By having the room shown to me, I was able to build a spacial dynamic between the characters, something that the play gave me no opportunity to do. The same worked for me, in the change of the clothes, and the way that Carol stood, which helped me identify the power shift a lot more easily. The disheveled appearance of John as the play moves on also helped with this.

However, the biggest shift from the play was with pacing. Having the two people actually saying the lines, and making it seem like a real conversation, instead of just voices in my head, made the dialogue flow in a much more effective way, and I really enjoyed it, this time around.

One of my classmates, Gautam, says in his blog, that the end of the film is a failure, because it slightly changes the ending of the play. I could not disagree with him more. The play and the film are not supposed to be direct adaptations. The role of the film, and the play, is to appear to the audience as something interesting to watch, not to translate 100%. By changing the end slightly, they have insured that the audience will think about the ending a lot more, because it creates a more open ending.You can read Gautam's entry here. Gautam's Blog

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that I enjoyed the film a lot more than I did the play, because it made sense to me in the film medium.

Mask In Streetcar and Hedda

In the plays "A Streetcar Named Desire" by Tennessee Williams, and "Hedda Gabler" by Henrik Ibsen, we see masks used as tools to characterise the two protagonists, Blanche and Hedda, respectively. Both of these characters have come from lives that require them to be something that they are not. Blanche feels the need to portray herself as a much younger woman than she, so that she can feel accepted by the others. Hedda was pressured into being a son to her father, and she now uses that pressure as her mask, to make it appear as if she is a different person than she actually is. In both of these books, masks are used to help portray the pressures that society is putting on the characters, and how they deal with it. This is done through characterisation and through imagery.

Blanche uses the mask of her youthful dressing to hide her true self from Stanley and from Mitch.

Hedda uses the mask of her male upbringing to hide herself away from the pressures of being a woman in late 1800's Norway.

The Allusion of Oleanna

The tile of Oleanna alludes to the fact a 19th centurary utopian society named Oleana. This utopian society was in Pennsylvania, and was named after its Norwegian founder, Ole Bull, and his mother Anna.

In 1852, after a successful musical tour of the US, Ole Bull wanted to leave his mark in America . He bought 11,000 acres of land in Pennsylvania for Norwegian immigrants to settle. On this land, four main fiefdoms were developed, one of which was named Oleana. People flooded in, excited about the new, free land. The land was located in a valley between thick forests and they quickly realized the land was not suitable for farming. The community failed. By the middle of the 1850s the colonists all returned home or settled elsewhere in America .

I believe that this is an allusion to the fact that Carol is so obsessed with overthrowing the chains of oppression, even though they don't actually exist in this play.  A song was added at the end of the play, as an epigraph, which critiques the life in Norway, and was written to show the idealism felt by Carol in the play as well.

Again, I believe that it talks about how "grass is always greener" on the other side, and is used ironically here, to show how insane Carol is when she wants to try and find something more from the help that her teacher is giving her.

Themes and Motifs of Oleanna

In Oleanna, we see a couple of prevalent themes. These themes are all shown directly through the conversation, and carry a lot of weight, especially in today's society. These themes are as follows:

Communication:

The majority of this play is about the use of communication, and how it changes our perception of somebody, and our actions towards them. In Oleanna, communication plays a massive role in the pacing and setting of the scene. It doesn't work as well in the textual version of the play, as you don't have the same effect while reading it, but the use of interruption is one major role in this. Whenever John speaks to Carol, and as he is about to drive down a point, he is interrupted. Other examples of communication also include the teacher/student dynamic, the use of power in communication, which is shown through John abusing his power at the beginning, the use of ghost characters, and Carol's reliance on "the group" to put words in her mouth. Body language and intention also play a heavy role in the play, as they shape Carol's actions towards John in the second and third act.

Political Correctness:

Oleanna is very critical of the air of political correctness that was around in the 1990's. In this play, we see Carol feeling threatened by John, and she turns to her group, who I believe are a feminist activist group, for advice. They advise her that he is raping and assaulting her, even though he hasn't done anything that's anything like that. This makes the political correctness movement absurd, and points out the ability to misuse it for revenge or nefarious ends. 

Hedda Gabler Essay Analysis

In this essay by Weller Embler, which analyses the play of Hedda Gabler, by Ibsen, Embler states that he believes that Hedda is a tragedy, and one of Ibsen's purest. He says that Hedda's boredom, and her inability to deal with her husbands boring personality drives her to be discontent. I would agree with this, as we can see her boredom through her use of pistols as toys, and her constant need to meddle and mess with people. I would also agree that there is some merit to the fact that there is tragedy in this play, but I would not agree that Hedda is a tragedy.

Firstly, we see that that Hedda constantly lives her life to the fullest, and does whatever she wants, as a free woman. She eventually dies, which would typically be a staple of a tragedy, but the way that she dies isn't tragic at all, to me. I find that she dies free, and free of her repression, which, to Hedda, would be the ideal way to die. The fact that Hedda dies through suicide, and kills her unborn child, along with seriously hurting two people that love her very much, is rather tragic.

Another thing that I disagree with, and my classmate Gautam agrees with me on, is the fact that Embler says that the play is "a study of decay". He says that throughout the play, Hedda is slowly decaying. I would 100% disagree with this. Throughout the play, we see Hedda as a fairly static character, who simply doesn't care about what is going on. I disagree that anybody really changes throughout the play, and that, in fact, there are only two things that actually happen. The burning of the manuscript and the suicide at the end.

All in all, I feel like this essay had some good analysis of Hedda, and that it made some very good points. However, I don't agree with anything that it says, because I feel that he takes analysis without actually providing any context for it, or without looking deeper into the characters of the play.


A Note on Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler”
Weller Embler
College English , Vol. 7, No. 8 (May, 1946), pp. 456-458
Link: http://www.jstor.org/stable/370462