Ada's Piano Playing in Jane Campion's The Piano

Since the late eighteenth century, when the piano first became available for the private home, numerous female characters in literature have demonstrated their skill on the instrument. In nineteenth-century British novels, the prevalence of piano-playing women reflected the contemporary social expectation that middle-class women display some level of competence on the instrument. Yet representations of women pianists in twentieth-century films such as Jane Campion's The Piano (1992 Campion. Jane, dir . The Piano . Australian Film Commission/CiBy 2000/New South Wales Film and Television Office , 1992 .  [Google Scholar]) reflect a persistent Romantic fascination with women's piano playing as a means of expressing authentic inner emotion, especially sexual passion. In this paper I provide an overview of existing historical scholarship on the significance of the piano in nineteenth-century British and colonial culture. In light of this cultural history, I examine Campion's feminist reworking of the Romantic ideal of the artist. Judith Butler's model of performative subjectivity enables us to see the constructed nature of the Romantic ideal of individual self-expression as deployed in The Piano. In Campion's film, Ada's pianistic performance functions as a literal metaphor for the constitution of her subjectivity in the Butlerian sense. Moving beyond a critique of the Romantic model of artistic self-expression, however, I read the central violent conflict of the film as a specifically Victorian collision between genteel feminine and Romantic models of musical performance, the locus of which is the body of the piano-playing woman—Ada.     

Weird Lullaby Jane Campion's <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Piano</Emphasis>

This article examines the construction of woman's voice, gaze and desire in Jane Campion's Oscar-winning film The Piano, 1993, with particular reference to the film's central character, Ada, and to the traditional female figures which her character suggests - siren, mermaid, Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard's wife. It investigates the ways in which The Piano interrogates and disturbs traditional patriarchal narratives, ways of speaking and seeing, and patriarchal constructions of bodily pleasure and desire; revealing these as partial, hard of hearing, short sighted and incapable of pleasure. It argues that while the film succeeds in this interrogation, it goes further in its attempt to envisage forms of speech, sight and pleasure which do not conform to traditional models based on the notion of rigid oppositions between self and other, masculine and feminine, active and passive. Instead, by focusing on mutual pleasure, sensuality, communication and the ability to be moved, it sets in motion ‘other’ ways of experiencing and understanding women's voices, looks, desires.It concludes that The Piano articulates a demand for an encounter with men, in which women are neither marginalized as ‘the feminine’ nor re-incorporated into a patriarchal order; and imagines the possibility of both autonomy and connection, power and pleasure.     

Narrative,Theatre, and the Disruptive Potential of Jury Directions in Rape Trials

Over the past 30 years, the Australian state of Victoria has made numerous reforms to a set of jury directions purporting to address concerns that rape trials do not adequately respond to the reality of sexual offending in the community. Building on work identifying the predominant narratives mobilised in rape trials, in this article we consider whether the way in which a jury consumes information during a trial explains why the jury directions, positioned and utilised as they are, appear to have been inadequate to the task of enabling juries to re-imagine evidence through alternative narrative frameworks.     

Jane Eyre's Daughters: the feminist missions of Mary Carpenter and Josephine Butler in India

The nineteenth-century literature served as a theatrical space wherein culture and politics merged to constitute women's subjectivity. Charlotte Brontë's literary imagination of the heroine's ‘mission’ in Jane Eyre heralded Mary Carpenter's reform of Indian women's education and Josephine Butler's campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts in India. This article explores the way in which the writings of both feminists betray imperial/anti-imperial and domestic/political aspects of their activities, as Brontë represents such complex issues through the deliberate articulation of the protagonist's subject-position, seeking the configuration of the female political network which stemmed from Jane's individual engagement with nineteenth-century gender politics.     

Apostolic Minds and the Spinning House: Jane Ellen Harrison and Virginia Woolf's Discourse of Alterity

Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1928) and Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) are two of the most iconic figures in British feminist history whose enduring influence have helped create and sustain a multitude of feminist discourses. Interestingly, both produced their landmark feminist studies in Cambridge when it was, arguably, the most aggressively anti-feminist institution in Britain at that time. Evidence of the kind of institutionalized disciplinary control Cambridge historically exercised on women can be found in the three Committals books (1823–1894) of the Spinning House (1631–1894) in the University archives. So called because the inmates were given wool to spin, the Spinning House was a penitentiary for young girls who were judged to be compromising the morals of the undergraduates. The Spinning House had its basis in the legal authority of the University which declared ‘That the University by virtue of their Charter sanctioned by Act of Parliament, have an undoubted right to cause the Public Street to be inspected, and loose and disorderly women to be taken up and sent to the Spinning House or the house of correction’. Against the background of the culture encapsulated by the Spinning House, women academics, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, were making tremendous efforts to bring about intellectual equality. And though the two—the spinner and the woman student—occupied mutually exclusive spaces, they were nevertheless held on the margins of the power structure that produced both. This paper examines the socio-historical context and the puritan intellectual politics of Cambridge against which feminist theories of Harrison and Woolf were produced to identify some of the methods with which they negotiated masculine orthodoxy and structured their feminist discourse of alterity.     

Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen: 'Rape' and 'Love' as (Feminist) Social Realism and Romance

Mary Wollstonecraft's argument for female reason in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) remains an iconic text for thinking through the his-torical struggle between claims to 'equality' and 'difference' for women. Wollstonecraft herslf embodies the antinomy within European Enlightenment thought exposed by simply being female . Jane Austen's writing career, following on from Wollstonecraft's death, offers a quite distinct mode of writing reason for women in her narrative work. While Wollstonecraft's narratives and theoretical arguments can be shown to raise as textual symptoms the deep struggle between female-embodied subjectivity and Enlightenment reason, Austen sublimates her own magnificent claims to reason in writing itself. Wollstonecraft's novels subsume narrative form to analytical content, dramatizing the sufferings of the female subject of Enlightenment 'patriarchy'. Both her principal characters, Mary and Maria, are as good as dead by the end of their narrative struggles, and these narratives founder on their own analysis of autonomous, rational female subjectivity as 'impossible'. Wollstonecraft projected a historical desire to repudiate the humiliations of femininity under Enlightenment patriarchy. Her work engendered a history of feminist reasoning to answer its painful questions. Austen's work, by contrast, seems to have floated effortlessly to the pinnacle of narrative literary achievement, while remaining uncompromisingly feminocentric. Austen's novels have a tendency to resist feminist theorizing or to fit the paradigms of feminist argument only indirectly. Tauchert explores this apparent polarity between Wollstonecraft and Austen as contrasting origins for distinctive modes of female reason in writing. Wollstonecraft's tortuous textual displays of female reason in writing offer a familiar mode of thinking about the historical and personal enlightenment of women, sustained in a tradition of feminist materialist analysis; Austen's pure narrative offers a hitherto more opaque alternative.