Text, image, audience: Adaptation and reception of Andrea Newman’s A Bouquet of Barbed Wire (1969)

Engaging with adaptation theory and narrative theory, and relevant contemporaneous critical reviews, this essay textually analyses Newman’s original novel and its television adaptations and considers these in relation to audience reception, as well as to other similarly placed literary adaptations. In analysing the repression of incestuous desire, and the sado-masochistic themes that arise in A Bouquet of Barbed Wire, this chapter also refers to Freudian psychoanalysis, connecting the themes of incestuous desire, and associated guilt-induced masochism to narrative theory in the way that these dual fantasies propel the narrative forward. Finally, this essay comments upon incest as taboo in interpreting audience reception.