The Birds, by Daphne du Maurier: Tracing the ambiguities and vicissitudes within the process of adaptation by Alfred Hitchcock

Abstract

The following article analyses the adaptation of the Daphne du Maurier’s novella The Birds (1952) by the American film producer and director Alfred Hitchcock. The work focuses on the examination of the way in which during the adaptation process, the analysis of the results of the transposition reveals the strict links between the cultural, social and political aspects related to the context of production and reception. In this sense, the study focuses on the intersections, the analogies as well as the omissions and perversions of the source text that foreground the problematic relation between text and hypertext. For this purpose, the work draws on the concepts and tenets of critical feminist discourse, poststructuralist poetics and narratology in order to identify how the emergent tensions product of the changes and deviations from the original source, discursively deploy relevant matters related to the criteria of authority, creativity and intentionality. Finally, this article proposes a metatextual reading of the film that enables us to capture the transcendence of the hypotext as a spectral text that actualizes the vicissitudes of the masked practices and politics of androcentric and heterosexual aesthetics responsible for the historical pervasiveness of subjugation of female bodies and the silencing of their voices.