The Limits of Sexual Emancipation: Feminism and Jane Campion's Mythology of Love

Author(s): Noelle A. Baker

Source: Interdisciplinary Literary Studies , Fall 1999, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Fall 1999), pp. 1-22
Published by: Penn State University Press

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 The Limits of Sexual Emancipation:
Feminism and Jane Campion's Mythology of Love
Noëlle A. Baker
Georgia State University

The best part of a kiss ... is that moment just before. . . .

We're addicted to that being intertwined with each other,
whether it was really positive or negative. ... It means finding
the clearest mirror, and the most loyal mirror. . . .
- Jane Campion's The Portrait of a Lady

I have enjoyed writing characters who don't have a twentieth-

century sensibility about sex. They have nothing to prepare
themselves for its strength and power. . . . We grow up with so
many expectations around it, that it's almost like the pure sex-
ual impulse is lost to us. But for them . . . [t]he impact of sex
is not softened, it's cleaner and extremer for that.
- Jane Campion, "The Making of The Piano"1

Jane Campion directs movies about strong, eccentric women.2 In her two
recent films, The Piano (1993) and The Portrait of a Lady (1996), she examines
imperialism, scopophilia, and erotic power in her rendering of the sexual eman-
cipation of two such nineteenth-century figures. Campion promotes her own
understanding of the gothic novel's "power of eroticism" to effect this emanci-
pation for women ("The Making of The Piano" 140). Chiefly in terms of
women's claiming victory over their historically restricted sexuality, she hopes
to overturn Victorian objectification of women with her contemporary revision.
Campion emphasizes the "outrageous morality" of this modern interpretation of
female sexuality in her comments about The Piano. Instead of being the object
of desire for a man, Campion suggests that
[The protagonist] Ada [McGrath] actually uses her husband
Stewart as a sexual object - which seems very innocent but in
fact has its power. ... It [produces] a relationship of power,
the power of those that care and those that don't care. I'm very
very interested in the brutal innocence ofthat. (138-39)
Indeed, Campion finds resonance for her own sexual politics of power in Emily
Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847), which Campion characterizes approvingly
as "very harsh and extreme, a gothic exploration of the romantic impulse" (140).
Critics recognize a similar impulse in Portrait. Rachel Abramowitz articulates a
critical commonplace when she honors Campion's daring revision of repressive

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Victorian sexual standards in both films, in which Ada McGrath and Isabel
Archer are "liberated by erotic passion."3 This essay examines the effects of
such sexual liberation on Campion's protagonists, primarily in The Piano. Cam-
pion emancipates her heroines from an earlier period's sexual inhibitions and
constraints, although not to the extent that Campion seems to imagine. Estima-
bly, Campion gives her female characters freedom for fantasy and sexual ex-
pression; moreover, she ostensibly supports a feminist project by reversing the
traditional balance in the gender wars. Yet Campion recreates both men and
women's sexual objectification. Ultimately, she promotes a violent exploration
of feminine sexuality, with disturbingly anti-feminist implications.4
Undeniably, Campion emancipates Ada McGrath sexually. The basic plot
of The Piano disrupts the Victorian romance narrative, whose typical resolution
in marriage represses multiplicitous or extramarital sexuality in women. Ada,
"brutally innocent," in fact demonstrates Campion's revisionist celebration of
woman's power, "the power of those who care and those who don't care," for
she manipulates the sexually frustrated (and perhaps equally repressed) white
men in the film. Like Campion's Isabel Archer in Portrait, Ada enjoys the
dominance implicit in her rejection of men who desire her. Isabel also reveals
her sexual emancipation and freedom for sexual experimentation. She fantasizes
about erotic encounters with each of her suitors individually and again in group
scenarios. Isabel steps out even more radically when she initiates a kind of nec-
rophiliac encounter with Ralph Touchett at his deathbed.5
But what are the results of this victory over women's sexual repression?
Campion's politics echo disturbingly in Isabel's seeming arousal at Gilbert Os-
mond's abuse.6 After Osmond pushes, trips, and hisses at Isabel, she tentatively
yet achingly reaches out to kiss him. The best part of a kiss is that moment just
before. . . . We 're addicted to that being intertwined with each other, whether it
was really positive or negative. . . . It means finding the clearest mirror, and the
most loyal mirror. Campion implies that what she characterizes as extreme,
"gothic" passion - be it abusive or domineering - is liberating, pure, and very
very interesting, even in the aftermath of its reprisal.7 For Campion, such a vi-
sion of the "pure sexual impulse" represents an honorific "mythology of love":
about Portrait she comments that through experience Isabel learns "[o]ne of the
most important things," "the mythology of love" (Abramowitz). Campion elabo-
rates by quoting Jamesian scholar Alfred Habeggar's characterization of Isabel
as one divided between "a partly factitious determination to be her own master,
and a dark fascination with images of dominance and submission." Campion
claims, "I love this quote. . . . The attraction is deeper than you can control"
(Abramowitz). Campion thus seems to celebrate for women a "gothic" sexual
emancipation determined by a fascination with power and pain, an erotic attrac-
tion deeper than they can control - despite the cost. Equating her own interpre-
tation of the gothic' s "brutal [erotic] innocence" with "pure" sexual emancipa-

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tion, Campion liberates her recent heroines to an unrepressed eroticism which
entails an inevitable fascination with dominance and submission. As Priscilla L.
Walton observes in "Jane and James Go to the Movies," "Campion's heroine
[is] a victim of her own sexuality" (189). And likewise she implicates the
(largely female) spectators of her films.8
In The Piano, Campion similarly implicates her spectators in Ada's fasci-
nation with dominance and submission as the inevitable byproducts of sexual
emancipation. Like Isabel Archer, Ada ultimately promotes her own repression
as a function of feminine desire. The Piano explores sexuality, gender, and
power through the fortunes of a mute Scottish woman named Ada McGrath who
"speaks" rebelliously through her piano, her body, and her desire. The McGrath
family sends the wayward Ada and her illegitimate daughter Flora across the sea
to the remote New Zealand wilderness for Ada's arranged marriage to Stewart.
In response to this marriage with Stewart, who is a European colonizer of native
Maori land in New Zealand, Ada asserts her resistance to Victorian restrictions
on women's sexuality. Stewart's refusal to honor Ada's creative spirit drives
Ada to Baines, another transplanted European who has adopted Maori customs.
Ada's affair with Baines disrupts the typical conclusion of nineteenth-century
romance novels, since Ada leaves her husband to begin a new life across the
ocean with her illegitimate daughter and her illicit lover.
Despite Ada's determined rebellion, sexual liberation in The Piano actually
reinstates violent sexual repression. It figures much like the sexual attraction
Campion's Isabel Archer cannot control - a fascination with dominance and
submission that ends in abuse at the hands of Gilbert Osmond. En route to her
new life with Baines and Flora, Ada attempts to drown herself in the ocean by
deliberately entangling her foot in the ropes securing the piano to the canoe.
Insisting that the Maori canoeists throw the piano overboard, Ada falls with her
piano to the ocean floor and to her potential death. Ada's ultimate decision to
free herself from the piano might seem a signal of her self-determined liberation
from restrictive convention. Bursting to the water's surface, she appears to cele-
brate life and rebirth. But when Ada cries, paradoxically, "What a deathl What a
chance! What a surprise! My will has chosen lifel" (121, my emphasis), she in-
scribes both death and life in her symbolic resurrection. When Ada names her
new identity as both a death and a life, she seriously undermines the authenticity
of her victory for women's expression of desire. In fact, Ada's words pronounce
the death of her individuated sexual being. If this death-in-life Ada is woman's
victory, does that mean that women's desire must ineluctably provoke the sexual
violence Campion's films depict?
Ultimately, Ada's sexual rebellion fails to invert the punitive costs of
women's sexual experimentation. Campion perhaps unconsciously reenacts
nineteenth-century objectifications of woman through the flat ideal of "true
womanhood," a notion scholars now complicate in ways other than Campion's

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 (inverted) model of sexual dominance and submission.9 Campion's Ada fulfills
ironically static roles - object of sexual desire, commodity exchange, and social
stabilizer. Despite her initial resistance as sexual dominatrix, Ada ultimately
invites her own oppression quite conventionally. Campion seems unaware, per-
haps, of her own implication that, inevitably, Ada's stubborn will must be re-
pressed, if she is to be reborn as a woman in a patriarchal world. In fact, Ada
succumbs to the romance genre's most conventional conclusions. She represents
Paula Bennett's remark about nineteenth-century women's autoeroticism: that
"[s]ociality, for women, meant submission to men and commitment to mother-
hood" (203).
Ada's submission belies the former strength of her sexual defiance, a rebel-
lion Campion places self-consciously in the context of French psychoanalytic
theory generally and feminist film theory regarding voyeurism.10 Campion de-
fines Ada's will - the key to Ada's exploitation of sexual power - in psycho-
analytic terms of linguistic resistance in the film's first and formative scenes.
The silent Ada does not speak; through her piano playing she replaces the La-
canian symbolic order with the Kristevan semiotic order.11 With this silence and
her stubborn will she defies the symbolic order from the age of six. Thus, as a
means of protection and feminine empowerment, Campion suggests that Ada
chooses not to speak symbolic language. The first "words" we hear in the movie
come from Ada's "mind's voice": "The voice you hear is not my speaking
voice, but my mind's voice." Ada silently tells us that "No one knows why [I
stopped talking], not even me. My father says it is a dark talent and the day I
take it into my head to stop breathing will be my last" (9). Ada's father per-
ceives her will as conventional society will later experience her unfettered sexu-
ality - as a mysterious and even dangerous resistance.
Ada silently continues to explain her dark mystery: "The strange thing is I
don't think myself silent, that is, because of my piano" (9). She acknowledges
that her piano is her privileged (semiotic) voice, a statement she will repeat in
the film's final scene. The piano, and her playing, protect her from the male
gaze and its repressive figuration of idealized femininity. Ada's iteration of her
resistance to symbolic language foreshadows our awareness of her more overt
defiance of societal convention.12 With her semiotic communication as well as
with her actions, Ada resists societal discourses restrictive of women's sexuality.
She defies their communication about and to women by speaking another lan-
guage, about her own sexuality of brutal innocence, about the power of domi-
nance, about those who exploit others' frustration and caring. In this way, Cam-
pion reverses traditional gender roles regarding manipulation and love, submis-
sion and exploitation. In the words of several critics, Ada "unmans" both Stew-
art and Baines, perhaps just as she emasculated Flora's father before he left Ada.
For this act of sexual emancipation, Ada experiences reprisal in kind.13
Ada's resistant voice, expressed through the piano, strikes the confusion,

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fear, and desire into others that Ada's father had implied when he called her
willed silence a mysterious and "dark talent." She "speaks" a language with
which few can participate. Unknown, it provokes anxiety. Aunt Morag, the con-
ventional European woman who counsels Ada's husband, articulates her fear of
Ada's semiotic voice when she exclaims to her daughter, "[S]he is a strange
creature and her playing is strange, like a mood that passes into you. . . . Your
playing is plain and true and that is what I like. To have a sound creep inside
you is not at all pleasant" (91-92). Not plain and not true to societal expectations
for woman, Ada rejects symbolic language. Similarly, she will not speak mo-
nogamy; instead she plays her multiplicitous, empowered sexual desire.
In more than one sense, the piano holds the key to Ada's mysterious exis-
tence, and her sexual emancipation. Ada links her willed rebellion to the piano
both by her decision to speak primarily through it rather than through symbolic
language, and by the decisive (if confusing) union of the two at the film's end,
in which Ada resumes a conventional family life in Nelson yet asserts the con-
flation of her identity with that of her ruined piano in its watery grave. But the
piano itself parallels Ada's linguistic and sexual defiance. In Campion's film,
Ada, as wife, holds the key to familial and even social stability; her piano holds
the narrative key to her sexuality.14 After Stewart gives Ada's piano to Baines in
exchange for land, Baines hires a piano tuner. Examining В aines' s new piano,
the tuner notes that it smells of cinder, for Ada - in an act which she will fatally
repeat - had in earlier times burned a narrative inscription into one of its keys:
"A V D." That inscription might document the sexual event that led to Flora's
illegitimate birth. Or it might denote another chapter - another lover - in Ada's
sexual history. Ultimately, "A 4 D" remains unknowable, like Ada herself. Its
hieroglyphic code, engraved on the piano's key, bears witness to the protective
semiotic force of Ada's multiplicitous chora. Until Ada encounters George
Baines, society cannot translate, and therefore name and punish, her sexual nar-
rative. In a sense, initially, her piano protects Ada from the punishment conven-
tional morality might inflict on the sexually rebellious woman.
We can infer, however, that the relationship with Flora's father informs
Ada's defiant sexuality. At bedtime, Flora begs Ada to tell the story of her fa-
ther, although Ada has told the story many times before. In fact, Ada passes on
(and therefore nurtures) her sexual narrative to her daughter matrilineally. She
teaches Flora about her illegitimacy in ways that contradict societal condemna-
tion of the fallen woman: theirs was a glorious passion ended only by her lover's
fear. Ada explains that they communicated in the mind, where "she lay thoughts
out ... like they were a sheet" (51), but when he became "frightened," he
stopped listening to Ada's thoughts. Only his fear of her deviant sexuality
blocked his former understanding of her semiotic communication. It is of course
possible that, via Campion's politics of dominance and submission, the lover
may have feared Ada, her lack of care, and her exploitation of his body for her

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own brutally innocent pleasure.
Ada's matrilineal nurturing of her sexual rebellion bears fruit in Flora's fan-
ciful description of her father to Aunt Morag. Explaining both the existence of
her father and the muteness of her mother, Flora whispers persuasively to Aunt
Morag that Ada and Flora's father were singing in a forest during a rainstorm, to
which, as lovers, they were oblivious. During the final bars of their impassioned
duet, lightning struck Flora's father, burning him up like a torch and leaving
Ada silent. Significantly, in Flora's make-believe description, she kills her father
for his betrayal. Campion emphasizes Flora's rejection and punishment of the
father by juxtaposing a cartoon image of a Chaplin-like figure burning up with
Flora's words. As humorously as the many deaths of Wile E. Coyote, the car-
toon character's stiff arms swing up over its head to assume the shape of a
flame, which then engulfs Flora's father totally. Notably, the father, not the de-
viant woman, burns as a result of their unlawful sexuality through Flora's nur-
turing of Ada's rebellion. Flora's fidelity to her mother's sexual emancipation
ceases when Ada removes the key to her piano and asks her daughter to deliver
it to Baines, a point to which I will return.
If Flora nurtures the memory of Ada's lawless desire, the piano holds the
literal artifact, the actual narrative of sexual emancipation. Its scripted key rec-
ords Ada's passion, the central feature of Campion's evocation of a sexually
emancipated woman. Still contained and protected within the piano, it remains
an integral part of Ada's persona before her fateful relationship with Baines.
This initial empowerment indicates additionally Campion's worthwhile com-
mitment to portraying powerful cinematic visions of women. Despite her objec-
tification as a woman, Ada protects her subjectivity from violation with her re-
sistant will. Like the safe haven implied in Kristeva's semiotic order, Ada's
will - linked to her piano - provides a protective barrier between her resisting
self and the infection of expected societal roles for women's sexual identity.
The nineteenth century witnessed radical change in politics, employment
opportunities, and demographic patterns. For men, women often fulfilled the
need to maintain the patriarchally invested status quo. The moral wife and
mother was perceived as a guarantor of social stability. Thus, the repressed po-
tential of unlicensed feminine desire remained as a convenient scapegoat upon
which to project societal anxiety. In Making Sex: Body and Gender from the
Greeks to Freud, Thomas Laquer suggests that historically, the biological under-
standing of gendered difference emerged after the eighteenth century, amid the
turmoil of an enlarged public sphere and post-revolutionary political upheaval.
Formerly irrevocable truths suddenly appeared less plausible, and the
womb . . . provided a naturalistic explanation and justification
for the social status of women. . . . Distinct sexual anatomy
was adduced to support or deny all manner of claims in a vari-
ety of specific social, economic, political, cultural, or erotic

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 contexts. . . . Whatever the issue, the [woman's sexual] body
became decisive. (152)
Feminist film critics suggest that woman provides the veiled mystery, the
terrifying heart of darkness which men fear in themselves and can only explore
with impunity if it is projected onto the other. Like her father's naming of Ada's
"dark talent," men's naming (and castrating) of women's sexual desire protects
their fears about their own sexuality. In "Veiling over Desire: Close-Ups of the
Woman," Mary Ann Doane explains that man's fear to lift the veil, which "visu-
alizefs] (and hence stabilize^]) the precariousness of sexuality" (107), also de-
rives from what he could find underneath - the desire which might disorder pa-
triarchal meaning. "The horror or threat of that precariousness ... is attenuated
by attributing it to the woman, over and against the purported stability and iden-
tity of the male" (Done 107).
Aunt Morag's criticism of Ada's playing as not "plain or true" articulates
Ada's relationship to the precarious function of the veil. In Campion's film, so-
cietal fear surrounds Ada and her piano's unnatural expression because woman's
unfettered sexuality threatens familial and hence social stability. In one of the
film's rare humorous scenes, both Stewart and Aunt Morag display their anxiety
about Ada's resistant strangeness: in her piano's absence, Ada has placated her-
self by "playing" a model keyboard inscribed on a table, while Flora sings the
melody. While Stewart and Aunt Morag calm each other by stating repetitively
that Ada's action "has not come to anything, just a concern" (40), Campion's
camera angle pans in on their hysteria: Aunt Morag's wildly fluttering fan and
Stewart's obsessive tea stirring.
Ada's perceived virtue hides her potential sexuality, the societal key whose
displacement provokes Stewart's murderous rage when he discovers her infidel-
ity. Because Ada resists the roles of faithful wife and mother and instead pro-
motes her sexuality as the key to her own subjectivity, she transgresses conven-
tional nineteenth-century expectations for women. Thus, when in violent retri-
bution Stewart punishes Ada, Campion implies that sexual death - her heroine's
symbolic castration - is still preferable to lost innocence today. The sexual
emancipation of her heroine provokes brutal punishment for Ada, despite Cam-
pion's intention of creating a revision of female sexual power within the gothic
romance genre.
Some nineteenth-century physicians sanctioned punitive methods to control
woman's sexuality; late nineteenth-century gynecological and psychological
discourses invoked their own punitive fetishization of the fallen woman. In Sex-
ual Anarchy, Elaine Showalter describes a prominent fin de siècle literary
theme, in which doctors similarly objectified women through
[their] opening up, dissection, or mutilation. ... If the rebel-
lious New Woman . . . could be turned into a silent body to be
observed, measured, and studied, her resistance to convention

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 could be treated as a scientific anomaly ... to be solved by
medicine. (127)
Showalter implies that nineteenth-century medical practices foreground lit-
erary themes at the century's end. But Victorian medical terminology also
haunts Jane Campion's portrait of feminine sexuality today in The Piano. Stew-
art's punishment for Ada's illicit affair with Baines echoes medical cures for the
rebellious New Woman. Contemporary psychiatrists, who identified women's
identity with their sexuality, prescribed S. Weir Mitchell's immolating "rest
cure" to cure female hysteria. (Male hysterics, by contrast, were told to become
more active.) Some physicians, on the other hand, favored physical or psycho-
logical surgery as the surest solution to cure female sexual deviancy. Freud de-
scribes this opening up of woman metaphorically to Wilhelm Fliess in 1900,
when he claims that "[Dora's] case has opened smoothly to my collection of
picklocks" (qtd. in Showalter 137). In language that resonates with imagery in
The Piano, Freud proclaims complacently that "No one who disdains the key
will ever be able to unlock the door" (137).
Like Freud, physicians and psychoanalysts, whose theories Campion self-
consciously invites, proposed reductive explanations to the problem of licentious
feminine sexuality. Like Stewart's exploitation of Maori land, some physicians
profited from women's bodies, or explained their sexual and emotional identity
through the womb. Female patients provided financial and professional rewards
undreamed of before the birth of the speculum.15 G. J. Barker-Benfield and
Carol Groneman contend that in the nineteenth century, newly established gyne-
cologists recommended sexual surgery, in part, to consolidate the success of
their fledgling sub-specialty.16 To such physicians, circumcision, clitoridectomy,
and hysterectomy provided a new source of income. Physicians operated on, and
hence profited from, society's fear of sexually deviant women - onanists, un-
faithful wives (like Ada), and prostitutes. Not surprisingly, at female castration's
peak, "doctors boasted that they had removed from 1,500 to 2,000 ovaries
apiece" (Barker-Benfield 120-21). Such gynecologists analyzed society's femi-
nine scapegoat, cut out her deviant source of evil, and made money in the proc-
ess. The American gynecologist Marion Sims adopted Freud's key in his ex-
perimentation with the speculum in 1845. Like Stewart in The Piano, Sims
imagines himself a "colonizing and conquering hero." He proclaims, "I saw eve-
rything as no man had ever seen before ... I felt like an explorer in medicine
who first views a new and important territory" (qtd. in Showalter 129). For this
kind of nineteenth-century medical discourse, woman is unexplored land, open
to plunder.
Similarly, in The Piano Stewart's and Baines's bargain reduces Ada to
property. If we consider Ada's intimate connection with her instrument, when
the men trade her piano for land, they trade Ada as well. Both men act as colo-
nizers in the deal. They each possess Ada's sexuality, for Stewart eventually

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watches Ada and Baines consummate their passion. But, in addition, Stewart
profits financially - he obtains eighty acres of land. Thus, Ada's traded piano
provides not only the key to her sexuality for the men, but also the key to her
husband's continued financial success as a colonizer. Together, he and Baines
codify her market value. Campion's cinematographic imagery confirms Stewart
as colonizer of both land and Ada by its connection between the New Zealand
forest and Ada's mind. Campion highlights this connection by focusing on
Ada's intricate hairstyle, elaborate and lush like Campion's representation of
New Zealand forest. The camera lens connects the two colonized territories; first
we see the back of Ada's head from above, with its intricate braids and swirls of
hair. The camera then continues down, closer, "into" Ada's head. As we come
closer still, the forest's sinuous branches echo and then replace the vision of her
hair; in effect, we seem to see Ada's mind, a reflection of the forest. And like
the land, Ada is the unknown but potentially colonizable. Like Victorian physi-
cians, Stewart tames the woman's rebellious desire with his knife-like axe.
Initially, Ada's hair signifies her complexity and defiance; it echoes her re-
bellious sexual narrative. In a sense, visually it parallels the heterogeneous pul-
sions of the chora. But Ada alters her untamed hairstyle after Stewart, as voyeur,
watches Baines possess Ada's sexuality. As I will suggest, the two men objec-
tify Ada through sexual and scopophiliac possession. Their mutual possession of
Ada diminishes the strength and complexity of her sexual rebellion. Similarly,
her sensuous coils lose their glorious twists; she pulls them back into a simplis-
tic bun at the time of her symbolic castration. "Plain and true" by the film's end,
Ada's hair slowly shows how Ada abandons her former lush multiplicity, her
brutal sexual innocence. It reflects the barren burned stumps surrounding Stew-
art's land, standing in sharp contrast to the lushly manufactured jungle tropics
Campion foregrounds as central to Ada's identity (and the Maoris').17
When Stewart and Baines separate Ada from her piano through their bar-
gain, they join to combat Ada's defiant sexual emancipation. Ironically in terms
of Campion's revisionist gothic, however, Ada herself must participate actively
in her own obj edification in order to get the piano back. Crucial to an under-
standing of Ada's participation is the fact that Baines, as much as Stewart, un-
dercuts Ada's resistant subjectivity. Campion tempts us to regard Baines as the
sympathetic lover who reawakens Ada's sexuality and saves her from an insen-
sitive husband.18 It is true that Baines emancipates Ada's sexuality anew (al-
though she has experienced such freedom at least once before), but at what
price? Ada's affair with Baines triggers the brutally punitive measures elabo-
rated in some Victorian medical discourse and practice, a violence strongly sug-
gested as well by Campion's interpretation of gothic passion. The name
"Baines" holds sinister connotations. Among varied meanings "bane" can sig-
nify a murderer, or death itself (OED, def. 1, 3).19 It seems doubtful that Cam-
pion would consciously invite such a connotation for her sensitive lover, but in

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fact, Baines exerts the violence potentially lurking in the meanings of his name.
In reality, he only foreshadows Stewart's more obvious violence later in the
film. Although Baines may love or desire Ada, he leads her away from her
privileged self, the piano, and toward Campion's emancipated sexuality by
deeply questionable means. After all, Baines proposes that Ada buy back her
piano with her body. The stages of their increasing, forced intimacy read like a
slow motion viewing of rape. Each progressively intimate act - watching,
touching, lying with clothes and finally without - seemingly leads Ada closer
and closer to owning her piano. Ironically, however, Baines actually alienates
Ada from her cherished articulator, her semiotic protection. Acutely aware of
Ada's connection with her instrument, Baines forcefully separates Ada from her
piano after one of their more fateful lessons. Confused and distraught by the first
experience of lying with Baines (clothed), Ada breaks away to seek the safe
touch of the familiar keys. She strokes them, palm up, in a deeply sensual ges-
ture. Reacting quickly, Baines slams the lid over the keys and onto Ada's hand.
It is as violent a measure as Stewart's later strategies of enclosure and emblem-
atic of her symbolic castration.
Thus, individually Baines conducts his relationship with Ada through
means that arguably suggest the dominance and submission that Campion pro-
motes in the mythology of love. In addition, Baines and Stewart unite through
the power of the male gaze and voyeurism. In "Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema" Laura Mulvey describes the power of the male gaze to fetishize its
object, to project its fantasy on woman: "women are simultaneously looked at
and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact
so that they can . . . connote to-be-looked-at-ness" (11). Mulvey condemns the
misogyny in traditional film techniques, through which typically male filmmak-
ers have projected their own fear and desire onto the woman. Feminist film the-
ory reexamines the precarious role women were required to play in the nine-
teenth century and today. Both dangerous sexual threat and necessary stabilizer
of that threat, women should arouse desire without experiencing desire them-
selves. They must instead play the passive role that Mulvey describes as be-
longing to the object of male fantasy, the creation of masculine "meaning."
Through the male gaze, Baines and Stewart both share this scopophiliac fantasy
of meaning, with Ada as its key. Campion engages overtly in this feminist film
critique in The Piano and Portrait, just as she invites the French psychoanalytic
theories of Kristeva, Lacan, and Cixous. Campion lays bare the historic method-
ology of scopophilia in filmic images of women through her representation of
Baines and Stewart, and gives both Ada and Isabel moments of power through
this examination.20
Baines's bargain with Ada for her piano reenacts previous bargains which
have used her as an economic commodity - her father's original deal with Stew-
art for Ada's hand, and Stewart's and Baines's exchanging the piano for land.

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Again, her body closes the deal, but this time with the important difference of
her own willing acquiescence. Significantly, Baines teaches Ada to contribute to
her own objectification. Tempting her with the possibility of regaining the pi-
ano, Baines explains, "You see, I'd like to make a deal. There's things I'd like to
do while you play. If you let me you can earn it back" (52). Initially desiring
only the gaze itself, Baines looks at Ada through the screens of his "bedroom,"
across the room as he smells and caresses her discarded jacket, and from the
floor as he looks up her skirt.
Stewart also participates in Baines's fetishizing gaze. Before the photogra-
pher takes the formal wedding picture, Stewart checks the vision. He freezes his
sense of power as possessor of Ada's sexuality as he looks through the camera
lens before joining his bride. In fact, Campion emphasizes Stewart's objectify-
ing gaze by focusing the shot not on the image of Stewart looking through the
photographer's lens at Ada, but on Stewart's eye alone. We see Stewart's eye
through the other end of the lens; together, eye and camera lens fill up the
screen. While this gaze links Stewart to Baines because of their similar lust for
possession, Stewart's next act of overt voyeurism joins the two men in a frater-
nal bond. When Flora alerts Stewart to Ada's tryst with Baines, the cuckolded
man peeks through a hole in Baines's hut to view the lovemaking. Instead of
barging in with fire in his eye to protect stolen goods, Stewart chooses to watch
the entire process, even when, unknowingly, Ada hits him in the neck with one
of her shirtwaist buttons. Again, the two men share Ada's body.
Campion seems to equate such shared scopophilia with her heroine's liber-
ating sexuality, for indeed Ada rejects Stewart sexually, first by refusing his
advances and then by providing the humiliating opportunity for Stewart to wit-
ness his own cuckoldry. Ada may perhaps be interpreted here as one engaged in
the relationship of power, the power of those who don't care. Ada manipulates
both men sexually. After Ada participates in Baines's offer to exchange her
body for the piano, Baines returns her instrument before she fulfills the terms of
the agreement. Baines becomes frustrated by his only partially fulfilled sexual
fantasies; ultimately, Ada belongs to Stewart. Baines returns the piano because,
"The arrangement is making you a whore and me wretched" (76). Similarly,
Ada manipulates Stewart sexually. After he discovers Ada's affair with Baines,
he locks her up in their cabin. In reprisal, Ada tantalizes Stewart nightly. Sensu-
ally, she arouses him with her hands and fingers; however, despite his growing
excitement, she refuses to let him touch her. She controls his sexual energy.
Partially hoping that she will let him fulfill his unrealized desire, Stewart even-
tually removes the boards from their doors and windows. Disturbingly, however,
the freedom Ada gains through her sexual manipulations leads to violence.
Admittedly, Ada objectifies Stewart and Baines temporarily by frustrating
them, but her sexual manipulation of both men distracts us from the film's im-
plicit misogyny. Eventually, Ada participates in her own sexual objectification.

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Campion, in an example of classic residual misogyny, would have us focus on
Baines's (and Stewart's) "wretchedness," or sexual frustration, rather than on
Ada's status as a "whore," with all of the nineteenth-century consequences that
the term implies. Ada's participation in male desire means that she cannot
choose a new name and societal acceptance for her sexual rebirth. Instead, she is
still a "whore" and receives punishment, in conventional fashion. In "Historical
Differences: Misogyny and Othello," Valerie Wayne describes the critical mani-
festation of residual misogyny in Renaissance texts, in which "the discourses we
privilege in relation to ... texts [actually] inscribe the criticism we produce
about them" (154). Wayne's point applies particularly well to Campion's at-
tempted modernization of misogynist or "harsh" Victorian objectifications of
women in The Piano. Wayne recognizes that, historically, women like Ada have
unwittingly participated in their own oppression, even when they are actually
trying to free themselves. She cautions contemporary feminist critics not to fall
into the same trap: "Approaching the past through dominant discourses [such as
a view of women's sexuality as one comprised of (inverted) dominance and
submission] only doubles the risk of that appropriation and prevents our being
able to distinguish among available ideologies" (174).
Campion maneuvers similarly through the mine field of available ideolo-
gies. By endorsing a concept of dominance and submission as "pure" sexuality,
she in fact reinscribes her heroine within overly static critical and historical dis-
courses surrounding nineteenth-century romance literature, woman's role in
society, and medicine. Campion tempts us to celebrate Ada's sexual exploration,
her flight with Baines, and their resulting union. Seemingly, she reverses
women's objectification and sexual repression in the nineteenth century. But if
we celebrate with Campion, we must ignore the consequences of Ada's so-
called liberation. Together, Baines and Stewart punish Ada with the violence
traditionally reserved for feminine sexual deviancy.
After Stewart watches Ada making love with Baines, he exacts punitive
measures. In resonance with S. Weir Mitchell's (psychologically-sanctioned)
"rest cure," he punishes her by locking her up; in fact, he nails boards over every
window and bars the door from the outside. Without liberty or power, Ada cow-
ers on her bed in a dark room. She is reduced to the infantilization perhaps most
popularly acknowledged in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper
(1892). Later, Stewart colonizes Ada, much like nineteenth-century gynecologi-
cal doctors opened up and profited from their patients. He contains and tames
his property (in this instance, sexual) with a castrating blade, just as he plunders
and puts boundaries around the Maoris' New Zealand land with his initialed
stakes.
Not surprisingly, Stewart succeeds in controlling his sexual property: he
limits the feminine chora that Campion symbolizes in Ada's piano playing. For
the first time, Ada fears her multiplicity, represented by the piano's semiotic

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expression, her hairstyle, and her deliberately unlimited sexual desire. Early in
her captivity Ada holds and kisses her reflection in a hand mirror; she seems to
cherish her sexual emancipation - it hardly needs Baines as a stimulus and thus
affirms Campion's thoughts about the power of those who don't care. In this
instance Campion seems to parody or undercut the male gaze, for Ada caresses
her own reflection in a kind of autoerotic trance. Nevertheless, Ada also sees a
deviant sexual self in the mirror that she must repress if she is to remain a
woman within the patriarchal economy of desire. She begins to acquiesce to the
symbolic order she formerly resisted with her semiotic, sexual narrative. And
Ada has been subdued by both her own participation in male desire and Stew-
art's punishment. Her own rebellion begins to frighten her because of the violent
punishment it invokes. Repentant by necessity, Ada seeks a conventional image
in her reflection. Indeed, in the last days of captivity, Ada's multiplicitous chora
disintegrates. She fears the rebellious heterogeneity she sees in the mirror. Cam-
pion emphasizes the connection between Ada's complex hairstyle and her rebel-
lious sexuality in this scene, as well as Ada's gradual submission to the sym-
bolic order of language, society, family. Ada lies on her bed in the half-darkness
of the rest cure immolation. As she looks forlornly in the mirror, she smooths
her hair, plain and true, close and straight to her head.
Ada renounces her formerly resistant self after her punitive rest cure. She
does so by inscribing her sexual narrative into the piano (as she did earlier in her
relationship with Flora's father), but with more submissive implications; she
removes a key from the piano and burns into it the inscription, "Dear George
[Baines], you have my heart, Ada McGrath" (94). Such a scene would appear to
promote Campion's vision of women's sexual emancipation, Ada's free and
public participation in the mythology of love. Instead of writing the story of her
sexuality and hiding it protectively within the piano (as she had done before),
Ada liberates her (implicitly sexual) subjectivity in writing by sending the key to
Baines, whose very name can imply murder. Missing a key and thereby incom-
plete, the piano now matches Ada's self-renunciation. It ceases to protect her
from the wages of sin. The Maori who examines the key after Stewart's enraged
interception perceptively remarks, "It has lost its voice. It can't sing."
Ada's act of writing upon the key emphasizes her treachery to her self, for
over her resisting subjectivity she rewrites the submissive invitation to take her
"heart." And it is stunning that she does so knowing that Baines cannot read;
indirectly, she sends the key to her subjectivity to the one most able to correct
her ostensible deviancy. Ada gives the key: - the medical key, the Freudian
picklock - to Stewart. Thus, Ada's formerly resistant key becomes simply one
more of Stewart's property stakes.21 Although feminine key and patriarchal stake
each represent a representative symbol, inscribed with its owner's initials, Stew-
art now holds them both. Virtually asking to be opened up, Ada hands over the
mysterious, resistant key to her body's secrets.22 Suggestively, Flora functions as

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messenger in this act. It is Flora who delivers the key to Stewart instead of to
Baines. Flora's transformation from nurturer of Ada's multiplicitous sexual nar-
rative to the indirect catalyst for Stewart's violence signals the complicated re-
lationship Campion depicts between mother and daughter. In terms of human
behavior, Flora may merely find in Stewart a convenient substitute for her car-
toon-like father. It seems telling, however, that Flora's abandonment of her
mother coincides with Ada's renunciation of her former sense of subjectivity. 23
When Flora gives Stewart Ada's key, Stewart, like Freud, possesses the
picklock. He now, like Freud, possesses the authority to cure the sexually defi-
ant or deviant woman. As a European colonizer, Stewart has the social justifica-
tion to tame native lands (and Ada's alien sexuality) with the axe. Stewart drags
Ada to a stump in the yard, screaming as he does so with self-entitled rage at her
infidelity. Ada, as if she participates in an inevitable ritual, never changes her
pale, obdurate expression as Stewart forces her hand down onto the stump and
hacks off her finger in a brutal symbolic castration. He then orders Flora,
splashed with her mother's blood, to return the finger to Baines, as a representa-
tive severance of Baines's sexual possessions of Ada. Left alone, Ada sinks into
the mud as she jerks, helplessly, in pain.
Horrifyingly, Stewart croons to Ada, "I clipped your wing, that is all. . . .
My love bird" (112). He echoes the assumptions of familial and societal dis-
course with the chilling "We shall be together, you will see it will be better"
(112). Stewart assumes that his punishment of Ada's transgression will restore
the familial base so vital to wholeness and "meaning" in society, with its collu-
sive repression of feminine sexuality. Stewart thus sees himself as ending dis-
ruption in his gothic romance. And, indeed, Stewart's punitive surgery succeeds
in completely effacing Ada's former sexual identity, for when she awakes from
her feverish sleep she silently "speaks" into Stewart's mind. She asks to be
saved from her will, the former guardian of her subjectivity: "Let [Baines] try
and save me. I am frightened of my will, of what it might do, it is so strange and
strong" (115). Now, Ada truly fears her sexually rebellious subjectivity. Hum-
bled, she seeks salvation through the traditional roles of wife and mother.
As the chastened Ada, Baines, and Flora float away together toward their
new life, Ada rejects her prior identity. Predictably, she renounces the piano.
Ada acknowledges the Maori canoeist's complaint that the piano is a "coffin"
and insists that the men "drown" it. Flora convinces Baines to throw the piano
overboard, crying, "She doesn't want it. She says its [sic] spoiled" (120). Ada
agrees; she, too, is physically spoiled, impure, untrue. Better to drown with the
piano. However, Ada ultimately chooses instead death-in-life. She chooses a
penance, the renunciation of her own resistant sexual emancipation. Ada rejects
physical death; she elects instead purgatorial familial virtue in life. It is Campion
herself who emphasizes the penitential role in Ada's new life through her depic-
tion of the sensitive Baines, who, by his own admission, still possesses Ada's

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key (he saved the missing key). As she walks alongside her new home, Ada
even attempts to learn symbolic language - the resistance to which initially de-
fined her formerly resistant will. Having given patriarchy the key to open her
subjectivity and plumb its secret depths, now draped in a black shroud reminis-
cent of the nun's veil, Ada recites her new catechism: "Fa, Fa, Fa, Pa, Pa, Pa."
Chastened, but smiling up at Baines, Ada fulfills the role of true womanhood.
Campion's The Piano implies that Victorian discourses appropriate the fig-
ure of woman to maintain patriarchal hierarchy in a changing societal environ-
ment, a figure which Ada accepts submissively at the film's end. However, de-
spite her conventionally happy ending, Ada ultimately privileges metaphorical
suicide under the water with the piano over her relationship with Baines. Ada
leaves the screen with the film's most authoritative (because final), moral state-
ment: "At night I think of my piano in its ocean grave . . . and myself floating
above it. ... It is a weird lullaby and so it is; it is mine" (122). Campion juxta-
poses Ada's words with a reunited vision of the piano and Ada floating ethere-
ally above it. This is perhaps Campion's own concession to the problematics of
Ada's victory for women. With the final words of her heroine, Campion ques-
tions the moral truth of her gothic revision. One wonders if the brutal innocence
of Campion's pure sexual impulse in fact provides the clearest mirror, and the
most loyal mirror, in which to reflect woman's desire.

Notes

]The Portrait of a Lady. Dir. Jane Campion. Polygram, 1996. Jane Cam-
pion, The Piano (New York: Hyperion, 1993), 135-38. Citation to The Piano is
somewhat problematic because the published screenplay and the film are not
always identical. All quotations derive from the screenplay (and occur as well in
the movie) or 'The Making of The Piano" (a commentary affixed to the end of
the volume), unless otherwise indicated.
2See, for example, Campion's acclaimed art films Peel (1982), A Girl's
Own Story (1983), Sweetie (1989), and An Angel at My Table (1990).
3See Rachel Abramowitz's online article, "Jane Campion," available at
<[Link] [Link]/archi ves/WIH_96/campion/[Link]>. Subse-
quent references to this article will be cited parenthetically as "Abramowitz."
Many observers find in Ada's and Isabel's erotic freedom and power a clear
victory for the possibility of unfettered representations of female sexuality.
Cyndy Hendershot, for example, writes that "Campion questions the easy as-
sumption that feminine desire is necessarily positive and subversive per se. Ada
here expresses a ruthless deployment of sexual power neither of the male char-
acters ever enacts" (104). Henderson quotes other critics' approval of Ada's
claiming "masculine Byronic will" and the "apparent sadism and anger of char-
acters such as Heathcliffe and Rochester." Thus, like Carol Jacobs, Henderson

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regrets that "conservative" critics on both left and right find this "overt expres-
sion of complex feminine desire" controversial (406-07, n. 17). I would argue
that the problematic issue in Campion's film centers not on her worthwhile at-
tempt to represent woman's sexual expressions, but on her refiguring of the
historically punitive violence exacted upon "deviantly" sexual women, a brutal-
ity not inflicted upon historical and literary male Byronic figures for similar
sexual transgressions or use of sexual power. Likewise, men have not typically
been the subjects of rape and physical violence at the hands of women. Hender-
shot and others celebrate complex feminine desire without acknowledging that
in this instance "sexual complexity" produces Ada's rape and maiming and
thereby evokes centuries of women's abuse, not pleasure or freedom of sexual
expression.
4Positing at least three potential endings to The Piano as well as Campion's
self-conscious theorizing about film, Carol Jacobs finds that a reading such as
my own would be reductive: "The politicality [the film] poses (although not its
politics) is performed as a punctual a-morality. ... At the critical turn of ethical
crisis it disrupts the inevitable (re)assertion of structure, power, hierarchy. Not
irresponsible amorality, but response-ability at its most vigilant, if also most
unpredictable" (780).
5For collected responses from critics of James, film, and narrative studies to
Campion's interpretation of The Portrait of a Lady, see the articles by Nancy
Bentley, Alan Nadel, Virginia Wexman, Priscilla Walton, Karen Chandler, Dale
Bauer, and Marc Bousquet in the Henry James Review 18 (1997).
6Nancy Bentley remarks that Campion "flirt[s] with violence, dismember-
ment, and even masochism as the touchstones of Isabel's social predicament" as
a part of her attempt "to keep alive the possibility of a stronger female agency"
(178).
7Cyndy Hendershot investigates Campion's use of the gothic while reaching
different conclusions than my own. Hendershot finds that Campion dissolves the
heterosexual binary opposition of domination and submission found in the tradi-
tional gothic; her only complaint resides in the film's fairy tale quality.
8Although Suzy Gordon focuses on Campion's self-conscious exploration
of cinematic gaze (which she reads more positively than I do), she remarks that
"The Piano reveals an impasse in which the very process of sexual difference
[and violence] ... is continually being reactivated at the moment of its concep-
tual undoing" (204).
9Barbara Welter set the tone for critical understanding of nineteenth-century
women's restricted sexuality in 1966. In "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-
1860," Welter suggested that to "contemplate the loss of purity brought tears; to
be guilty of such a crime . . . brought madness or death. Even the language of
the flowers had bitter words for it: a dried white rose symbolized 'Death Prefer-
able to Loss of Innocence'" (154). A recent special issue of American Literature

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entitled "No More Separate Spheres!" attests to the growing sense among critics
that, in the words of Cathy Davidson, separate sphere ideology is "a retrospec-
tive construction that has had the effect of recreating a binarie gender division
among contemporary critics" (444). Scholars concur that domestic ideology
loosely defined women after the eighteenth century in terms of morality, moth-
erhood, and spirituality, but disagree about how rigidly such definitions re-
stricted, empowered, or created "separate but equal" status for women. See
Coultrap-McQuin, Cogan, Baym, Harris, Tonkovich. Women writers, working-
class women, and actresses frequently subverted such rigid categories, some-
times at their peril. See Bardes and Gossett, Kelley, and Linkon. Griffin-Wolff
notes that in late nineteenth-century America even overt sexuality in women was
appropriate if subsumed under the maternal role. Similarly, Paula Bennett sug-
gests that "historians such as Carl Degler, Peter Gay, and Karen Lystra . . . sup-
plied solid evidence for the importance of sexual pleasure in the lives of many
middle-class nineteenth-century women"; while both Patricia Yaeger and
Bennett "have argued forcefully that, despite the interdiction on explicit lan-
guage, bourgeois women did find a multitude of ways, some more coded than
others, to put their pleasure into print" (191-192). Nevertheless, formerly "virtu-
ous" women and prostitutes who engaged in extramarital sexuality risked vari-
ous punitive measures, as this essay will explore.
1()Citing one example of Campion's theorizing about cinema, Jacobs notes
of the Bluebeard play, "what one cannot avoid seeing at least here, if not clearly
elsewhere in The Piano, is that this is less a play within a play than a film within
a film" (764). As an example of critics' assumption that The Piano makes
French psychoanalytic theory literal, Diane L. Hoeveler writes of Ada's willed
silence, "This dramatic gesture has been widely praised as strikingly original in
the reviews of the film in the United States, but consider that silence has long
been a traditional posture of female protest in ... French feminist theory. . . .
Campion would appear to be working rather self-consciously in ... [this] tradi-
tion" (110). See also Gordon, Hendershot.
1 •Theorist Julia Kriste va reworks Jacques Lacan' s psychoanalytic analysis
of the relationship between language and human individuation. For both
Kristeva and Lacan, however, only by gaining the symbolic order may the sub-
ject enter into language, society, patriarchal signification. For Kristeva' s explo-
ration of the semiotic, see Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Litera-
ture and Art. Kristeva suggests that, despite the symbolic order's hierarchical
predominance in the patriarchal world, the semiotic wields its own power and its
own space. Although accessible to men and women alike, it is often linked theo-
retically to the feminine, and contains life's primary but endless dichotomies -
anal and oral pulsions, life and death. Kristeva uses the Greek word chora (en-
closed space or womb) to name the space which contains these powerful hetero-
geneous pulsions. She suggests the primacy of the multiplicitous chora, which

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exists before the symbolic order and can only be expressed as music or poetic
rhythm (like Ada's piano playing). Kriste va writes, "[N]either model nor copy,
the chora precedes and underlies figuration and thus specularization, and is
analogous only to vocal or kinetic rhythm" (Revolution 26).
12In her study of Emily Dickinson and The Piano, Cheri Davis Langdell
compares Ada's silence to both Dickinson's use of the dash and other charac-
teristic thematic elements, which serve to protest the patriarchal system.
13Although she reads Campion's feminist project positively, Sue Gillett
points out the violence triggered by Ada's expression of dominance: "In defense
against his own castration and Ada's phallic presumption, [Stewart] attempts to
reverse the situation ... by twice attempting rape and by symbolically chopping
off Ada' s finger" (286).
l4Caroline Molina notes, "If the piano is Ada's musical voice, it is also as-
sociated with her (sexual) body" (270).
15Certainly, such medical misogyny was not universal; in fact, the practice
of female castration as a treatment for sexual deviancy was a subject of debate,
both among gynecologists and between gynecologists and other physicians. In
"Nymphomania: The Historical Construction of Female Sexuality," Carol Gro-
neman quotes an example of a physician's criticism of such violent treatment:
'"But would anyone strip off the penis for a stricture of a gonorrhea, or castrate
a man because . . . [of] moral delinquency ?]'" (351). However, echoing other
contemporary feminist critics, Groneman reiterates that gynecologists used fe-
male sexual surgery to "consolidate their professional position" as a new medi-
cal specialty in the nineteenth century (351). Laquer explains that bilateral
ovariotomy (the removal of healthy ovaries) became, around 1 870, "an instant
success to cure a wide variety of 'behavioral pathologies': hysteria, excessive
sexual desires, and more mundane aches and pains whose origins could not be
shown to lie elsewhere"; it was thought that "removal of the organ would . . .
halt . . . sexual excess" (176).
16Barker-Benfield describes gynecologists' intense professional competition
with the midwives they hoped to supersede with their surgical procedures.
17One of the criticisms of Campion's film derives from her naïve depiction
of Maori people as stereotypical noble savages who remain pointedly outside the
action and primary actors. As Carol Jacobs suggests, "the Maoris, we are made
to understand, delight in a range of free sexual pleasures. . . . But where are we
heading here, if not to that great commonplace that native peoples and women
are closer to nature and unfettered sexuality" (760). Critics observe that the
widespread acclaim for The Piano has obscured Campion's cultural appropria-
tion of the New Zealand landscape and Maori people in the film. Both fore-
ground Ada's sexual reawakening, and the Maoris appear negatively in contrast
to Campion's depiction of Ada's European, aesthetic whiteness. New Zealand-
ers have also complained of Campion's coopting of a heritage she experienced

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only briefly in childhood; her manufacturing of artificial and botanically inaccu-
rate New Zealand "bush" in service of her aesthetic symbolism; and her unac-
knowledged use of the New Zealand author Jane Mander, whose unappreciated
book The Story of a New Zealand River (1920) bears striking resemblance to the
plot of The Piano. See Dyson and Goldson. Diane L. Hoeveler questions the
feminism in Campion's film as well as her personal integrity regarding Jane
Mander, whom Hoeveler describes as the epitome of the silenced and marginal
woman artist: "And yet ironically [Mander] has been silenced by another
woman [Campion], and one who has repeatedly depicted herself as a marginal-
ized New Zealander" (1 15).
18Others point out the positive aspects of Baines's characterization in the
film. Baines is said to prove himself to be open to Ada's desire when he returns
the piano to her; similarly, Harvey Keitel's frontal nudity (in the scene where
Keitel, as Baines, caresses the piano) is regarded as vulnerable and even "femi-
nine." Such commentary identifies the "feminine," "gentle," and "sensuous"
qualities of Baines as a product of his identification with women and Maori
culture without recognizing the extent to which such identification can be
viewed as appropriative and reductive. Molina, for example, suggests that
Baines "speaks the mysterious and musical language of the Maoris . . . and
shares their unashamed celebration of the body (wearing Maori markings and
practicing a discreet and tender version of their open sexuality and affectionate
nature)" (270).
19I am grateful to Professor Paul Schmidt for suggesting the negative con-
notations of Baines's name. Some other related meanings include poison; ruin;
or a cause of harm (OED, def. 2, 5). Ironically, bane can also signify a procla-
mation of marriage (OED, def. 8).
^Critics have devoted much commentary to Campion's self-conscious criti-
cism of the cinematic gaze. See Jacobs, Dyson, Gordon, Chumo, Molina, Hend-
ershot. Bentley notes that Campion's Isabel actually incorporates Ralph's sco-
pophilia in her own pleasure; "Ralph's watching is presented as part of the
make-up of her own desire" (176). Similarly, Dyson suggests in reference to The
Piano that there are two ways in which Campion reconfigures the traditional
male gaze: "through an ambivalent treatment of Ada's clothes in relation to her
body and sex, and through the prioritization of other senses (notably touch) to
convey the sexuality of the Ada/Baines partnership" (262).
21Naomi Segal suggests that colonization "operates by the structures of
capitalism: . . . marking and counting out. Analogous to piano keys and fingers,
[Stewart's] numbered territorial stakes measure out the landscape" (208).
22Campion foreshadows Ada's act in the community play, in which the
players reenact the story of Bluebeard and his many wives. In the play, the fear-
ful wife witnesses the gory heads of her predecessors before giving the blood-
thirsty Bluebeard her own (literal) key.

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 23Naomi Segal observes in this context that Flora is "coopted by the patriar-
chal-symbolic society of the Scottish colonisers. . . . Continuing to wear her an-
gel-costume - the Hebrew for 'angel' means 'messenger' - she will act as
transmitter of judgment and carrier of keys" (207).

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