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Revelations Through Word With Image: Class and Gender Hierarchies in the Seattle Art

Museum’s Tale of Genji Screens

Zoë Wray

December 15th, 2014

When an image illustrates a text, the text and the image form a symbiotic relationship in

which one illuminates the other, revealing ideas that may not have been visible. Discrepancies in

what the text says and what the image shows provide an area of examination that can uncover

intentions of the artist or revelations about the culture in which the text and the image were

created. The Seattle Art Museum’s pair of late seventeenth-century screen paintings from the

Iwasa Matabei school depicting chapters thirty-three and thirty-five of The Tale of Genji, an

eleventh-century novel written by Murasaki Shikibu, is an especially noteworthy example of a

Genji illustration where the artist diverged from the text in significant and illuminating ways.

Each screen depicts a particular moment within chapters thirty-three and thirty-five of the tale.

When one compares the screens and the text, the motifs and figures included or not included in

the image reveal the artist’s keen awareness of class distinctions and gender dynamics at play in

The Tale of Genji as a representation of the Heian court society, one in which people clearly

know their place and do not step outside these hierarchical boundaries. The women in both sides

of the screen are particularly entangled in spectacle because the text and the image treat them as

objects of beauty as they perform specific musical instruments, on view for the male courtiers in

the tale. For the viewers of the Seattle screens, I argue that the artist’s specific attention to class

systems at work in the The Tale of Genji reflects the Confucian four-class system that was rigidly

enforced by the shogunate during the Edo period, shaping the artist’s rendering of the tale that

emphasizes class and gender lines, and foregrounds the roles that women and the lower classes

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played as spectacles for the Heian court.

The Seattle Art Museum screen that depicts chapter thirty-three of The Tale of Genji only

represents a small segment of the chapter in which Genji hosts the emperors at his Rokujō palace

for an autumn party (see fig. 1). The chapter begins at a memorial service for the anniversary of

the death of the late Princess Ōmiya. Chancellor Tō-no-Chūjō, the son of the Minister of the Left

and Princess Ōmiya, decides to invite Yūgiri, a son of Prince Genji, to view the blossoming

wisteria with him in an attempt to make amends and forgive him for his sexual intimacy with

Kumoi no Kari, Tō-no-Chūjō’s daughter, years ago. Yūgiri agrees, and they drink wine and

enjoy the wisteria leaves and the music. Pretending to be drunk, Tō-no-Chūjō admonishes Yūgiri

for what he did with Kumoi no Kari, suggesting that he does not have respect for his elders.

Yūgiri apologizes profusely, insisting that he does respect his ancestors and is sorry that he made

it seem as if he did not. Then Tō-no-Chūjō begins to sing “new wisteria leaves,” a metaphor for

Tō-no-Chūjō offering Yūgiri his daughter’s hand in marriage, admitting that his daughter is to

blame for the love tryst although he would have liked Yūgiri to come forward to make amends

first instead of himself.1 Yūgiri replies in poetry to accept the offer, and the festivities continue

on in merriment.

At the end of the evening, Yūgiri pretends to be too drunk to leave, and Tō-no-Chūjō,

who is actually drunk by this point, obliges his request to stay the night. With the help of

Kashiwagi, Tō-no-Chūjō’s son and Yūgiri’s best friend, he sneaks into Kumoi no Kari’s room

and they have intercourse once again. Meanwhile, Genji and Murasaki attend the Divine Birth at

the Kamo festival, discussing that Murasaki will have to return to Rokujō while his daughter,

Akashi, and her mother will replace Murasaki at the palace. Once Yūgiri is promoted from

Consultant Captain to Counselor, he and Kumoi, who have married, move into Yūgiri’s late

1 Shikibu, Murasaki. The Tale of Genji. Translated by Royall Tyler (New York: Viking, 2001), 564.

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grandmother’s residence Sanjō, where Tō-no-Chūjō finds them quite happy. The screen depicts

the ending sequence of chapter thirty-three, in which Genji invites the most important people in

the court to his Rokujō estate. He has invited Emperor Reizei who subsequently invites Retired

Emperor Suzaku to join him.

The top section of the screen focuses on the royalty of the Heian court and establishes the

social hierarchy of the figures present in the scene via its composition (see fig. 2). This section

depicts the Rokujō palace, where the court royalty sit and have a meal while they admire the

autumnal beauty outside and the beauty of the palace itself. Just as they are at the top of the

Heian court hierarchy, they also occupy the top of the screen, securing their power over the

literally lower social groups present in the picture. These groups include the members of the

court that are at the near top of the picture but still below the emperors who are invisible, the

lieutenant guards slightly below them, and then the cormorant fishers who are more significantly

below the court members. The women courtiers in the screen, who are near the bottom of the

picture, are not lower than the cormorant fishers socially. They do, however, occupy a uniquely

strict role in court society, where their actions and life paths are heavily dictated by societal rules

in a way to which men are not subjected. The fact that the women are separated by the walls

around them and the vast space between them and the other figures in the painting thus

represents women’s unique situation in the Heian court, since they are part of the elite while

being denied the freedom and power that the elite normally have.

But at the top of the screen at the palace, we see the members of the court seated around

the porch of the palace. At the foot of the stairs, the lieutenants of the inner guards sit on the left

and right, presenting a brace of fowl and the fish from the lake that Genji requested from the

Imperial cormorant fisher (see fig. 3).2 While we can see the lieutenant guards and the

2 Murase, Miyeko. Iconography of the Tale of Genji: Genji Monogatari Ekotoba (New York: Weatherhill, 1983),

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anonymous courtiers seated around the porch, Emperor Reizei, Genji, and Retired Emperor

Suzaku are not visible, as they are seated behind the drawn bamboo blinds of Rokujō out of

sight. By not allowing the viewer to see these important figures, the artist asserts their power by

not subjecting them to the power of the viewer’s gaze. The emperors’ invisibility cements their

superiority to the lower peoples of the court by keeping the emperors out of view while

subjecting everyone else in the high court to the viewer’s gaze. The viewer gets to see and thus

know the other figures in the screen, gaining some control over them by watching them. Privacy

is a privilege, one that the emperors get to exercise in order to maintain whatever image they

desire. The lower classes, on the other hand, do not have this privilege. These classes’

reputations and characterizations are in the hands of the artist and the viewers, and thus they

have less power than the emperors. By being able to control when and how much viewers get to

see them, these figures also become more attainable to us. But the emperors escape our gaze, and

thus remain unattainable and at the top of the line of power. The artist chooses to keep the

emperors invisible in reverence of their power and to remind viewers that they have the most

privilege in this society when it comes to how their image is projected. The text supports the

artist’s choice to keep the emperors out of sight, as the privilege to avoid gaze was a real concern

in Heian society: in preparation for the emperors’ arrival at the Rokujo estate, Genji made sure

that “cloth panels hung wherever Their Majesties might be exposed to view.”3

The second section of the painting gives the cormorant fishers a large portion of space,

introducing another social class to the screen for viewers to see while also emphasizing the

fishers’ place in the social hierarchy (see fig. 4). Using birds to capture the fish on the lake, the

fishers wear completely white robes, distinguishing them from the dark-robed high courtiers.

186.3 Shikibu, The Tale of Genji, 573.

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Although Genji had employed the cormorant fishers that day not only for food but for visual

interest, the courtiers face inward toward the palace, almost as if they are unaware that the fishers

are there. The fishers do not seem to notice the royals either, for they are all faced towards the

water to concentrate on their task at hand. Both groups have a relationship with each other (one

group works, the other group benefits from their work), yet they remain separated by space in the

screen and by the lack of gaze flowing between them. This space, which is enforced both by the

space between them in the painting and the lack of eye contact, establishes the absence of

overlapping or blending of the different social classes in the Heian court, and all groups abide by

their stations in life and the duties that come with it. They live in their own worlds despite their

connections, and keep their boundaries clear and distinct.

In the text, Genji chose to have the cormorant fishers provide the meal not because he

intended the fishing to be a “spectacle,” but because it was “something of interest” to view as his

visitors entered the palace.4 From this line of explanation from the text, it seems that Genji did

not mean for the cormorant fishers to be the featured entertainment at the Rokujō palace

gathering, but a rather a part of the scenery, like the autumn foliage. But the artist chose to

devote a significantly large portion of the screen to a mere detail in the text. Compared to other

images of this same portion of The Tale of Genji, this artist made the cormorant fishers even

more the center of attention than other artists by giving them ample space in the painting and

placing them at the near center of the composition (see fig. 5). By making this compositional and

spatial decision, the artist changed the narrative by elevating the cormorant fishers to the role of

spectacle, objectifying them as a mere sight of amusement for the court and lowering their status

even more in relation to the court. Unlike the emperors, who we cannot see at all and therefore

do not have to have their characterization chosen for them by the artist or the viewers, the

4 Ibid.

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cormorant fishers are subjected to the artist’s interpretation and the viewers’ gaze, automatically

seen as entertaining pawns of the court.

While these two groups do not watch each other in the screen, the third section of the

screen contain female courtiers who are watching everyone in the screen (see fig. 6). But they are

separated by walls, space, and a lack of acknowledgment from the others in the screen which

uniquely keeps them from participating any more than observing the gathering that day at the

Rokujō estate. Wearing colorful robes and enclosed completely by walls and an autumn tree that

hangs over them, these women are cut off from all of the action taking place in the other sections

of the screen. Unlike any other figures in the screen, they are not mentioned at all in this section

of the text, making their inclusion in the screen a deliberate choice of the artist. Because they are

not included in the text, the artist may have included them to remind viewers that while the text

does not mention them, they would have been there. Despite the fact that these women courtiers

were wealthy and well-educated, as women in a patriarchal society they were not recognized as

equal to men. Thus in the screen they are relegated to the role of observer at the Rokujō banquet,

prohibited from sitting with the other male courtiers and having a seat closer to the emperors.

In the left screen of chapter thirty-five, women gain a bit more power in that they get to

be more than bystanders in the events depicted on the screen, but they are still subservient to men

and treated like spectacles rather than people, both in how they are described in the text and the

way the artists places them in the composition of the screen (see fig. 7). Leading up to the scene

that the screen depicts in the chapter, three years have passed since the previous chapter, in

which time Makibashira, the daughter of the Left Commander Higekuro, marries Genji’s brother

Prince Hotaru. The current emperor, who is Genji’s son, abdicates the throne. The oldest son of

the Akashi princess is then named crown prince. Meanwhile, Murasaki, Genji’s principal wife,

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desires to become a nun, but Genji refuses out of love for her in his life. He makes a pilgrimage

to thank the god of Sumiyoshi while he is in exile. When Retired Emperor Suzaku reaches his

fiftieth birthday, Genji decides to throw a party for Suzaku. Suzaku, who had been teaching the

Third Princess to play the kin, a plucked seven-string Chinese musical instrument, remarks that

he hopes to hear her play, but he doubts that Genji has continued her lessons.5

Overhearing this, Genji realizes how embarrassed he would feel if the Third Princess

plays poorly at the party, and decides to “begin teaching her in earnest” so she is ready to play

for the Retired Emperor.6 He then decides to make this a larger affair, and chooses the most

musically talented women courtiers to join him in a Heian jam session. To provide rhythmic

accompaniment, Genji orders appoints the third son of the Minister of the Right and Yugiri’s

oldest son to play on the veranda. The first plays the shō, a Japanese free reed musical instrument

and the second plays the flute. Genji assigns specific instruments to each woman he invites: a

biwa for Akashi, which is a Japanese stringed instrument, a wagon for Lady Murasaki, believed

to be a truly authentically Japanese stringed instrument, 7 and a sō no koto, another Japanese

stringed instrument for Genji’s daughter Akashi. All of the women dress in elaborate, colorful

robes, and Genji is captivated by their beauty which reminds him of flowers and nature. Lady

Murasaki “made a figure so beautiful and so perfect in size that she seemed to perfume all the air

around her and, to express it in terms of flowers, to put even the cherry blossoms to shame.”8

Genji describes several women in terms of nature, and while this does conjure beautiful

imagery, it also objectifies them, encouraging the viewer to consider these women only in terms

of what their looks have to offer. Describing Genji’s thoughts about the Third Princess, Onna

5 Ibid., 637.6 Ibid.7 Mitchell Clark. Sounds of the Silk Road: Musical Instruments of Asia (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts Publications, 2005), 50.8 Ibid., 641.

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San no Miya, the text discusses how Genji “peered past the curtain at Her Highness and saw an

unusually small, pretty figure who seemed to be all clothes. She still lacked any womanly appeal,

but she offered instead the charming grace of new willow fronds halfway through the second

month, frail enough to tangle in the breeze from a warbler’s wing. Her hair spilled left and right

over her cherry blossom long dress, and it, too, recalled willow fronds.”9 Whereas the writer

delved further into the personalities of the more important male characters in the novel, we learn

nothing about the Third Princess’s identity except in terms of her physical appearance, giving the

impression that her looks are what determine her value and make her intangible attributes

unnecessary for comment. After all, she is merely a spectacle, a pretty thing performing pretty

things for others of higher status to gaze upon. The fact that the text spends so much time

describing her appearance, it evokes the image of Genji staring at these women, using the power

of his gaze to transform the women into objects for his visual and auditory pleasure and to make

readers almost feel uncomfortable with the way he comprehensively appraises her, an undertone

of prurience to his description.

Genji compares the Third Princess’s appearance to the other women who are playing

instruments that day, further objectifying these women as if they are pawns that Genji can simply

compare and discard for the one that he finds the prettiest. After he finishes looking over the

Third Princess, he moves onto his daughter Akashi no Nyōto: “This is how an exalted lady looks,

one would have said, yet the equally elegant Consort had a somewhat fuller appeal and such

exquisite distinction of figure and manner that she resembled a rich cluster of wisteria blossoms

in an early-summer dawn, when wisteria has no rival...She wore a red plum blossom layering,

and the slender, graceful sweep of her hair in the lamplight lent her an unearthly charm.”10 By

9 Ibid., 640.10 Ibid., 640-641.

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suggesting that Akashi could be compared to wisteria blossoms that have no rival, the text

implies that she has more worth simply because of her beauty. By neglecting these women’s

personalities or identities outside of their appearances, the text not only converts these women

from people to visual props, but encourages the reader to view them as no more than objects as

well.

The text accomplishes this even further when it makes character judgments about women

based on their looks, as it does with its description of Lady Akashi, one of Genji’s former lovers:

“Akashi...wore her willow long dress over what may have been a grass green dress gown with a

slight, intentionally modest silk gauze train, but nothing about her figure or demeanor

encouraged one to look down on her.”11 Even though Lady Akashi has no dialogue here that

would tell either other people in the story or readers to “look down on her” or dismiss her in

some way, Genji and the text assume that we can make that judgment solely based on her

appearance, as if that is all one needs to determine her character. Because the text makes this

presumption, it makes it easier, if not causes, the reader to see her less as a person, and more as a

spectacle.

In the screen, the artist adds individual details to the women’s robes, painting them so as

to evoke the same luscious beauty described in the text. But even though these women are

talented and beautiful, the screen does not give viewers the idea that Genji and the women are at

all equal. Genji sits at the northernmost corner of the building in which they all sit,

compositionally higher than any of the woman, a metaphor for his superior ranking as seen in the

right screen. It is especially notable that the artist placed Genji here, since in other

representations of this moment in the chapter Genji is at the bottom of the room with the women

above him and his back to the viewer (see fig. 8). Furthermore, this represents a deliberate choice

11 Ibid., 641.

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on the artist’s part to not only diverge from convention, but from the text, which places Genji at

this moment in the center of the room: “The sliding-panel partition was removed from the aisle

room, so that the room was divided only be standing curtains, and Genji’s seat was prepared in

the space in the middle.”12 Even in the text, the arrangement of the women and Genji is more

symbolically egalitarian since he is on equal footing with the women spatially. But the artist of

the Seattle screen chose to raise Genji above the women in the composition, emphasizing his

superiority to them given by his gender and rank in the court.

While the women keep their heads down and do as Genji tells them, Genji gets the

privilege of sitting back and reaping the musical benefits of the women’s work, much like the

royals enjoyed the carp that the fishers procured in the first screen. The women become objects

of beauty and create beauty, to the point where they are given simplistic meaning and are not

characteristically developed as deep, full individuals. They almost seem to compete with each

other in the text for who is the most beautiful, with each woman trying to find the most exquisite

clothing. Each woman close to Genji is separated by a cloth wall, creating a square around each

one, as if they are each on display on their own pedestals (see fig. 9). The women who are not in

a box and are not playing instruments are crowded in the bottom left corner of the building, as if

discarded for not being beautiful or talented enough (see fig. 10).

Another compositional element of the paintings that take away even more power from the

women and give more to the men by subjecting the women to the viewer’s gaze while protecting

the men from it is the artist’s use of the fukinuki yatai device. The fukinuki yatai device, unique

to Japanese art and made famous for its frequent use in genji-e, the device shifts perspective in a

painting so that viewers have the ability to look into spaces within buildings instead of only

seeing the outside walls and windows of a building. Artists achieve this by removing the roofs

12 Ibid., 639.

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from these buildings and drawing them using diagonal lines, which give the effect of the building

rising up from the horizontal picture plane and approaching the space of the viewer. This device

has given artists the advantage of being able to show viewers the inside of figures personal

spaces in the image while also showing that they are in a personal space, since the viewer can see

that they are spying into a house via the opened up roof.

In the Seattle screens, only the women and the women’s spaces are subject to fukinuki

yatai. All the men in the screens, even the cormorant fishers, are seen from the front, and viewers

cannot see into their private spaces. This is what keeps the emperors in the chapter thirty-three

screen invisible to us, since they are inside the palace and the artist could have used fukinuki

yatai on the palace but chose not to. The women in both of these screens do not receive the

privilege of that privacy, and thus are even more demoted in value and power in the screens. The

fact that the artists lets viewers into their private spaces reminds us that despite their status as

courtiers, the implications that come with being female in gender outweigh their higher social

class in terms of the power and freedom that they have. For women, the class one belongs in is

somewhat of a trade-off: women in lower classes often have more freedom, especially in

marriage and the ability to divorce, but they have to work harder and have more responsibility,

while women in higher classes live more comfortably but have stricter rules to live by, and less

room to determine who they marry or when they get divorced.13

The objectification of women and the emphasis on class distinctions reflects the strict

class divisions that the shogunate rulers established during the artist’s life in the Edo period. In

this long-lasting era of relative peace, the shogunate rulers who came to power restricted foreign

influences and implemented a four-class social system inspired by Confucian China. From

highest to lowest rank, the four classes were the scholar-officials, or samurai, the peasant

13 Peter Duus. Modern Japan: Second Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998), 15-16.

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farmers, the artisans, and the merchants.14 According to Japanese history scholar James McClain

the government employed and ardently enforced this class system for several advantages that it

gave to ensure this government’s longevity:

Officials believed that placing people in segregated containers would make it impossible for them ever to mount a unified challenge against the hegemonic order…[this also] provided the government with ample opportunities to lecture people about the formal obligations that accompanied membership in any particular social estate...by finding ways to privilege the samurai as society’s elites, the overlords hoped to win the warriors’ eternal gratitude and ensure their service as loyal, unquestioning agents of state authority.15

With the government taking measures to enforce the class system such as decreeing certain

classes to maintain a specific diet,16 citizens of Edo Japan were made constantly aware of their

place in society. It would be no wonder that an Edo period artist would naturally inscribe his

society’s social hierarchies onto a story set in the Heian period, especially since similar

distinctions existed during that time as well.

While we do not know the patrons of the screen or the agenda behind their production, it

is possible that they were created for the shogunate or daimyo leader who wanted to enforce the

class distinctions. The Iwasa Matabei school responsible for these screens, was founded by Iwasa

Matabei whose style is inspired by both the Kanō and the Tosa schools. The school’s patrons

were of the highest social classes in Edo society, having been commissioned by the shogun

Tokugawa Ietsu to make paintings of the Thirty-Six Poets for the Tōshōgū temple. Given

Matabei’s specialization in Chinese and Japanese narrative painting, as well as his client base of

wealthy patrons, at the very least it is not a stretch to conjecture that the patron of this screen

desired Matabei’s expertise in this painting genre to convey a message beneficial to the social

14 Mikaso Hane. Modern Japan: A Historical Survey (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 23.15 James L. McClain. Japan: A Modern History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), 69.16 Ibid., 70.

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leaders of the time.17

Any story will create a different picture in the reader’s mind, a reason why movies

adapted from books can be disappointing for readers who expected a different vision. But when

scholars get the privilege to see how an artist or artistic school saw a text, it not only helps us

gain insight into the artist or his creation. It just as much gives us a nuanced understanding of the

text. When The Tale of Genji chapters thirty-three and thirty-five and the Seattle screens are

considered separately, one could not see the awareness of class and gender structures that

become clearer when they are studied in tandem. It would be impossible to know that the

emperors are missing from the right screen if we did not have the text to tell us that they were

there, and the fact that the women are included in the screen at all would not raise questions if we

did not know that they were not included in the text. It is lucky, then, that we have both the text

and the image because together they open up investigation into vital issues for understanding

Japanese culture that we would have missed.

Figures

17 Robert Treat Paine and Alexander Soper. The Art and Architecture of Japan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 250.

14

Figure 1. Unknown artist, Tale of Genji Screen: Chapter 33. c. 1650-1700. Seattle Art Museum.

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Figure 2. Unknown artist, Tale of Genji Screen: Chapter 33 (detail). c. 1650-1700. Seattle Art

Museum.

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Figure 3. Unknown artist, Tale of Genji Screen: Chapter 33 (detail). c. 1650-1700. Seattle Art

Museum.

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Figure 4. Unknown artist, Tale of Genji Screen: Chapter 33 (detail). c. 1650-1700. Seattle Art

Museum.

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Figure 5. Sumiyoshi Gukei, The Tale of Genji: Chapter 33. c. 1650-1700. Collection of Sado

Bunka Kenkyujo, Japan.

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Figure 6. Unknown artist, Tale of Genji Screen: Chapter 33 (detail). c. 1650-1700. Seattle Art

Museum.

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Figure 7. Unknown artist, Tale of Genji Screen: Chapter 35. c. 1650-1700. Seattle Art Museum.

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Figure 8. Tosa Mitsuyoshi, Tale of Genji Album: Chapter 35. c. 1650-1700.

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Figure 9. Unknown artist, Tale of Genji Screen: Chapter 35 (detail). c. 1650-1700. Seattle Art

Museum.

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Figure 10. Unknown artist, Tale of Genji Screen: Chapter 35 (detail). c. 1650-1700. Seattle Art

Museum.

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Works Cited

Clark, Mitchell. Sounds of the Silk Road: Musical Instruments of Asia. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts Publications, 2005.Annotation: I used this source to get specific information about the Japanese and Chinese string instruments that were described in Chapter 35 of the Tale of Genji, when Genji asks several women courtiers to play different musical instruments. The book helped me to understand the differences between the instruments and whether or not they originated in Japan or China.

Duus, Peter. Modern Japan: Second Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998.Annotation: This book is a historical survey of Modern Japanese history, beginning with the Edo period. I specifically used this book for its section on the roles of women in the different social classes in the Edo period to illuminate how the artist of the screen might have reflected his own society onto the Genji narrative.

Hane, Mikaso. Modern Japan: A Historical Survey. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992.Annotation: This book is also a survey of Modern Japanese history. I used it to discuss the four-class system inspired by Confucian China that the shogunate government enforced in Edo society, which shed light on the artist’s awareness of class levels present in the Genji tale.

McClain, James L. Japan: A Modern History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002.Annotation: Once again, this book explains the modern history of Japan. For my paper, I used an interesting quote the book contained which explained the reasons that the Edo period’s shogunate government implemented such a strictly ordered society.

Murase, Miyeko. Iconography of the Tale of Genji: Genji Monogatari Ekotoba. New York: Weatherhill, 1983.Annotation: This book uses different illustrations of the Tale of Genji and explains the parts of the chapters that each illustration is depicting. I found it especially helpful in understand which figures represented which characters in the chapter that the Seattle screen represented, as well as catching the small details that further identify the chapter the screen illustrates.

Paine, Robert Treat, and Alexander Soper. The Art and Architecture of Japan. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981. Annotation: This book is a dense survey of the artistic and architectural periods of Japan’s history, divided into two parts. The first part, which is dedicated to Japan’s art history, was useful for me in learning more about the Iwasa Matabei school which created the Seattle screen.

Shikibu, Murasaki. The Tale of Genji. Translated by Royall Tyler. New York: Viking, 2001.Annotation: This is the primary, and most important, text that I used for the paper. I used it to understand the narrative of the Seattle screen, and also to make comparisons between how the text expressed the narrative and how the screen expressed the same narrative. The differences and similarities were quite revealing, and those comparisons are essentially what my paper aims to explore.