Filling the Parental Gap: Familial Bonds in William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time
Filling the Parental Gap: Familial Bonds in William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time

Summary/Abstract: The purpose of the present paper is to analyze the social implications of Shakespearean adaptations in contemporary fiction, by exploring the ways in which the relationships between parents and children are portrayed in both the early seventeenth and the twenty-first century. In The Gap of Time, Jeanette Winterson deals with analogies by placing her reimagined work as a reaction to William Shakespeare’s play, The Winter’s Tale. In this sense, the rendering of the patriarchal nature of the Leontes and Polixenes characters fits the twenty-first-century discourse in regard to family patterns and gender roles, which are questioned and dismantled. Additionally, the youth are deemed as genderless when taking into consideration the significance of familial matters presented in both the play and the novel. Thus, The Winter’s Tale and the adapted text portray childhood virtue as the answer to the issues raised due to the parents’ lack of righteousness.

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