Abstract
Arguments between literature and other disciplines, such as linguistics, sociology, politics,
history, philosophy, psychology and film/visual studies – to name a few that constitute the
discipline of literary studies – continue to assert the status of literary studies as fundamentally
both cross- and inter-disciplinary. Such disciplines as film or visual studies have had a more
decisive influence on how literary texts have been received, even by those who may not have
read them, in the form of film adaptations of novels, for instance. Moreover, the simultaneous
existence of the literary text and its film adaptation remains a vexed and uneasy one – both for
the writer and reader/viewer who may feel that the film adaptation distorts the literary text’s
scope and vision – as will be evident in my discussion of the film adaptations of the three
novels, i.e., Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Zora Neale
Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Throughout this study, a common thread runs
through my argument: it is that, in adapting and translating the stories told by the novels into
cinematic images, all three film adaptations sidestep many of the crucial historical meanings
embedded in the novels. As one of the consequences of this, the films largely decontextualise
the aesthetic choices that the three novelists have made in presenting their respective worlds.
Thus, Steven Spielberg’s claim that in adapting The Color Purple he did not see it as “a Black
movie, but a film for all times and all people” mirrors the approaches taken by Jonathan Demme
and Darnell Martin in their adaptations of Beloved and Their Eyes Were Watching God
respectively. I argue that Demme’s Beloved turns the deeply metaphorical and historical
character of Morrison’s novel into what Anissa Janine Wardi calls a “spectacle” and “freak
show,” while Martin misses the point of what David Glover and Cora Kaplan call Hurston’s
“‘folk’ philosoph[ical]” novel, by turning it into a romance melodrama of ill-fated love.