Female Voicelessness and its Expression of Power - Case Study Example

Female Voicelessness and its Expression of Power The second half of the 18th century in which Queen Victoria set the standard for proper British behavior is generally referred to as the Victorian Period. This is the time period in which Jane Campion set her fictional story The Piano. Her choice in using this period in history is significant because it is generally considered one of the most repressive and socially controlling eras in history. Generally speaking, women living in this time period were considered little more than trade goods. Like trade goods, they were considered to be the property and responsibility of their male relatives. From birth to grave, the woman was completely controlled by the dictates of her father, her brother or her husband. Her own opinion in these affairs mattered to the degree that her associated male relative felt it should be considered and no more. Even the selection of who her husband was to be could be made without any consultation with the woman most affected. This is the kind of social situation discovered in the opening scenes of The Piano as Ada’s father bursts into her room to tell her that she has been married off to a man in New Zealand that she has never met. The voice-over, understood to be Ada’s inner voice, describes her feelings about leaving her home to cross the sea to live in New Zealand with this new husband. This quick introductory scene makes an instant connection between the character’s physical muteness and the muteness of women in her society. Even when she travels as far away as New Zealand, to a region that remains untamed frontier, Ada finds herself rigidly trapped within an Englishman’s world. However, in the character of Ada as she is acted by Holly Hunter, Jane Campion illustrates how such a woman made herself heard even to those who wouldn’t listen. Deliberately employed by Campion, the female voice has been a powerful symbol throughout history, yet its historical understanding is not widely recognized. Anne Carson provides a succinct analysis demonstrating how concepts regarding the woman’s voice have evolved from practices held in ancient history. According to Carson, it was up to the women to express the social group’s moments of extreme joy, grief, fear and hope through the sound of the ololyga: “a high-pitched piercing cry uttered at certain climactic moments in ritual practice … or at climactic moments in real life … and also a common feature of women’s festivals” (Carson, 1995: 125). Since the noise was distracting to the members of society who were not participating in these rituals, namely the men, the women were usually required to hold them at a location far enough outside of the city to be outside of hearing range. As time passed, the meaning of these rituals became obscure while the practice remained. This birthed ideas that women were savage mysterious outsiders to the race of men. Adhering to the customs, these rites were often female only with the male experience being only the witnessing of the strange sounds that were made and the mysterious separation they enforced in leaving the city limits to practice their arts. This associated woman with concepts of wild animals in the wilderness, hunting men in ways unique to the female species. At the same time, the ultimate male ideal was the individual who could control himself to the point that nothing, including sound, escaped from him without his express intention. As a result of these ideas, women became associated with extreme emotion and ideal men became associated with extreme stoicism. This inability on the part of the women to control their emotions indicated to the men that they needed a controlling influence in all aspects of their lives. Therefore, it was up to the men to control her, including the sound of her voice, if he was to keep her from reverting back to her inherent wildness. By refusing to use her voice at all, Ada separates herself as much as she can from her flawed society, locking herself into an outer shell of masculine ideal behavior. She only allows her voice to be heard again once someone is willing to try to hear her. As the film demonstrates, for Ada, voice is a means of gaining power in a world that would otherwise give her none. Appropriately, the idea that Ada’s muteness is a means of obtaining at least some power in her life is the primary focus of many critiques of the film. “Silence, when chosen rather than imposed, may be an act of defiance and resistance, and this is our preferred reading of Ada’s automutism in Jane Campion’s 1993 film” (Dalton & Fatzinger, 2003: 34). Instead of constantly attempting to make herself heard in a world that believes she has nothing worth hearing, Ada decides to remain mute. One somewhat surprising aspect of her character is that this sophisticated decision made in response to widespread social concepts was made when the character was only six years old and has been maintained through the birth of her illegitimate child and on into her first marriage. Rather than being amazed at the fortitude of spirit of such a young girl, it seems clear that Ada’s task was set for her. She determined not to speak to anyone who didn’t care what she had to say and hadn’t yet found that individual in all of her experiences to the point of the film’s beginning. Her one expression is the piano and the passionate music she plays on it. “Clearly, the character’s rejection of the spoken language available to her, a masculinist form, is central to this reading of the film … Her chosen silence also facilitates her physical location in the dominant, male culture while she simultaneously embraces a psychic wilderness separate from the people around her” (Dalton & Fatzinger, 2003: 36). Without the use of her physical voice, Ada has also developed strong psychic control that enables her to communicate, so she reports, with the tutor that became the father of her daughter and in the film, once with Stewart. Through Flora, Ada opens herself up to some limited interaction with the world with sign language in which the snap of her hands betrays the emotions she otherwise does not share. Yet her greatest emotional outlet remains hidden within the keys of the piano. Other critics agree that Ada’s silence is an element of power, but they indicate that Ada’s purpose is more to discover others that share her way of thinking rather than to wrest power from male society. Campion has suggested that this idea had occurred to her after reading through the poetry of Emily Dickenson, another artist who chose to conceal her true self in her art which tended to be inaccessible to the male ear. “Just as, no matter what, Ada’s will or dignity never permit her to speak out loud or protest her brutal treatment until she leaves the colony of unholy missionaries, so Dickenson locks her poetry for a sister to find … But neither persona, neither Ada nor Emily, is self-pitying; each retains her essential integrity and the purity of selfhood” (Langdell 200). In silence and near total isolation, Ada discovers herself and her own inner being as her best friend, greatest treasure and only confidant. She reflects upon the things that are important to her and why the things she communicates are expressed. As she points out, she doesn’t think of herself as silent because she expresses herself in a million different ways throughout the day. Within her own mind, she hears her own voice making small comments and criticisms regarding the world she is experiencing. From this vantage point of self-knowledge and higher critical thinking, she can watch events from a detached position, calmly waiting yet never really expecting anyone else to recognize her true voice and signal a desire to know her more. Although the audience does hear this inner voice speaking as the character explains elements of the story that might not otherwise be apparent, this is not inconsistent with the premise of the film. The voiceover tells us as audience important information to know about the character’s back-story and then fills us in on what she is thinking as she sinks to the bottom of the sea strapped to her beloved piano. It is after this nearly fatal experience that the audience learns she has started learning to use her voice again, having finally discovered a world in which her ideas and feelings will be valued. It is this voice of the future that is attempting to get her audience to understand her life as a younger woman. Throughout the story, Campion carefully demonstrates the degree to which people Ada meets are unwilling to hear her thoughts. In most cases, the people around her prove through their actions that they simply intend to own her in some way. Her first meeting with her new husband proves his unwillingness as he quickly assesses which packages will go with them and which will remain on the beach and just as quickly refuses to listen to her personal desires. His refusal to retrieve the piano even after understanding how important it is to her indicates his unwillingness to consider her as another human and effectively cuts him off from Ada’s voice. “Ada looks down at the abandoned piano on the beach far below, and thus the repeated melody begins to suggest Ada’s intimate connection to her piano” (Margolis, Campion, 2000: 51). George Baines, on the other hand, who works as Stewart’s hired groundskeeper, originally refuses to take her to the beach and her piano, but finally gives in to her pleading because he sees how important this is to her. As he watches her play and Flora dance, he begins to understand that the heart and voice of the woman are entwined with the keys of the instrument. Having made this connection, he then incurs great personal expense to bring the piano to his home so she will have access to it. He does this because he has become fascinated with this divided woman and wants to know more about what makes her work. It is through this growing understanding of her personal expression that Baines is finally able to discover the passionate woman she is inside. “Ada’s playing is a siren’s song, and though her husband appears deaf to its call, Baines, the more natural, elemental creature, responds immediately” (Hinson, 1993). Even while Baines is discovering Ada’s inner beauty and powerful expressiveness, her husband continues to reject the piano and any attempts Ada makes to communicate with him. By the time the piano is returned to Stewart’s house, Ada has given up on trying to get Stewart to understand. It is only after the dramatic climax of the film, when Stewart cuts off one of Ada’s fingers in a jealous rage, that he finally starts to ‘hear’ her. At this point, he finally understands that he has forever cut off any chance at knowing her through his earlier refusals and recent violent actions. Hearing her now, he finally realizes that the only way to save her soul is to give her away to Baines, the only man yet to reach it. In this final act of kindness and understanding, Stewart finally recognizes Ada’s humanity rather than seeing her simply as an object to be owned or a stubborn animal to be broken. There is yet another important element of Ada’s muteness in the film to be discovered in the Victorian ideals which indicated respectable women should not own property, make any important decisions or demonstrate too much outward emotion. Even the English ladies who lived right next door to the wild Maori natives in the sparsely settled lands of New Zealand tended to uphold these ideals. Not only politically and financially mute, these women maintained a stance of being emotionally mute as they meekly obeyed the directives of their husbands. Even among the women, excessive displays of emotion were considered an indication of the woman’s lack of breeding, lack of self-possession and obvious inability for rational thought. As a result of this assumption, her actions and words were considered safely ignored. Women who did not conform to these ideas were chastised by their female neighbors through exclusion or through direct intervention in the form of open criticism. This was another concept directly challenged by Ada. Although she doesn’t speak, this is the result of a conscious decision she once made as a child. “She vowed never to speak and with a will of iron has persevered. What we are hearing, she tells us, is not her speaking voice but the self-imprisoned voice that sounds inside her mind” (Stone, 1993). Although emotionally expressive at numerous points in the film, Ada never breaks her silence until Baines reaches her soul. Although she seems to have a strong lock on her emotions expressed in her silence and her dress, she conveys a deep sense of feeling in her music. The other women find this aspect of her character unsettling, noticing a “mood that passes into you … to have the sound creep inside you is not at all pleasant” (Campion, 1995). Yet these women only speak to her when giving directives as if she were a child. In spite of the importance of voice to the film, the piano is the most obvious piece of symbolism. The instrument is Ada’s voice to the deepest level of significance. It is representative of her emotions and the only medium available to express her inner passion. “The piano represents her sole means of expression: a symbol for freedom, sexuality, and the romantic vision of life” (“Jane Campion”, 2009). It is with this passion of her inner voice that Baines falls in love. His recognition of the woman in the sound and in the body engenders a response in her as well. The piano provides a physical manifestation of Ada’s complicated internal blending of control and raw emotion. It is capable of containing and expressing a tremendous amount of emotion, yet it requires individual control and sometimes cooperation to bring out the music. Attempts to control it externally, such as under the forceful demands of Stewart, only cause it to fall into silence or meaningless noise. Baines’ appreciation of the piano’s voice symbolizes his understanding of the underlying female soul and his willingness to discover it. His attempts to reach Ada are the first attempts within the film of anyone to work with Ada rather than demand something of her. At Baines’ expected departure, Ada determines to cut off the piano’s voice as well, symbolizing the death her inner passion. Only when the piano is thrown overboard does Ada realize her heart has shifted. The end of the film reveals Ada’s new life in which she is learning to speak again and gaining a new life. This physical voice is a powerful symbol that she has overcome the restrictions of her age. Baines created a detachable silver finger so she can play the piano again, reinforcing his support in helping her to regain her voice. She is permitted to give piano lessons to help support the household making her potentially self-sustaining and giving her power over herself. Finally, she seems actually happy, playing romantic games with Baines, wearing brighter and less constrictive clothing and watching Flora turning white cartwheels in the green yard of their home. As the film ends, it becomes necessary to wonder whether women today have really advanced to the point Ada has reached. The film questions whether women today are acting in accord with their own inner wants and desires or in accordance with social, typically male, ideals that have shifted but not changed. It seems clear that in making this film, Campion is calling for women everywhere to reassess their position and find new ways of making their true voice heard. Works Cited Carson, Anne. “The Gender of Sound.” Glass, Irony and God. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1995: 122-137. Dalton, Mary M. & Kirsten James Fatzinger. “Choosing Silence: Defiance and Resistance Without Voice in Jane Campion’s The Piano.” Women and Language. Vol. 26, N. 2, (Fall 2003). Hinson, Hal. “The Piano.” Washington Post. (November 19, 1993). May 8, 2010 “Jane Campion.” Art and Culture. (2009). May 8, 2010 Langdell, Cheri Davis. “Pain of Silence: Emily Dickinson’s Silences, Poetic Persona and Ada’s Selfhood in The Piano.” The Emily Dickenson Journal. Vol. 2, N. 2. Margolis, Harriet Elaine & Jane Campion. Jane Campion’s The Piano. Cambridge University Press, 2000. Stone, Alan A. “The Piano.” Boston Review. (1993). May 8, 2010 Filmography The Piano. Dir. Jane Campion, Perf. Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, Anna Paquin, Sam Neill. Miramax, 1993. Read More