Abstract
This paper examines the interplay between femininity, feminism, and fantasy, based on the analysis of the protagonist of Apple Tree Yard, a British television mini series (2017) adapted by Amanda Coe from the novel of the same name by Louise Doughty (Apple Tree Yard. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2013). This examination addresses the following questions: What causes a married, 52-year-old woman, with two grown children to engage in a reckless and perverse affair with a man she does not know? What unconscious fantasies have been evoked by the traumas of her childhood and of her adult life, and how do these unconscious fantasies encroach upon her external reality?