Adas Muteness and Voice - Essay Example

 Ada’s Muteness and Voice The Victorian Age, basically defined as the second half of the 18th century in which Queen Victoria set the standard for proper British behavior, is the age in which Jane Campion’s novel The Piano is set. This period in history is generally considered one of the most repressive and socially controlling eras in history. During this time period, it was accepted that women were little more than trade goods. They were constantly considered the property of their male relatives. This meant their fathers or their brothers if the father was dead had complete control over the woman’s life until she escaped their rules for the new rules of her husband, who was often selected by the men who ruled her to begin with. This is the kind of social situation that is described in opening pages of The Piano as the main character Ada describes her preparations to leave her home and cross the sea to New Zealand where she will meet the husband that her father has just married her to without having consulted her at all. This introduction makes an instant connection between her muteness in voice and her muteness in her society and even in her own life. Throughout the story, Ada is trapped in a man’s world, even when she goes as far away as New Zealand and its untamed frontier which is where most of the story takes place. However, in the character of Ada, Jane Campion shows how a woman without a voice made herself heard even to those who wouldn’t listen, demonstrating how voice could be used as a tool of power in an otherwise powerless world. It is helpful to gain a bit of historical understanding regarding the female voice in order to fully appreciate the significance of Ada’s silence and returning voice by the end of the story. Anne Carson provides a strong analysis of how concepts regarding the woman’s voice evolved out of ancient history. According to Carson, women expressed the moments of extreme joy, grief, fear and hope within the regular and climactic moments of life 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). Because the noise could be irritating to those not actively engaged in the celebration, these rituals were usually held outside of the range of hearing of the men and the city. Over time, this had the tendency to reinforce ideas of women as savage mysterious outsiders. Their religious rites were often female only, they made strange sounds while practicing and they practiced outside of the city limits, making them seem like wild animals in the wilderness. Meanwhile, the proper role of the man was to disconnect from his emotions enough to control the escape of unintended, uncontrolled sounds. A fully developed human was someone who could control himself to the point that nothing escaped without his intention. Thus, ideas developed that characterized women as being incapable of controlling their emotion and defined the ideal person as someone who expressed no emotion. It was forgotten that women were merely observing the necessary and traditional rituals of the tribe in their practices as women were increasingly associated with an inability to control their emotions. This inability suggested to the men that these members of society required an external control over them in all things to prevent them from causing harm to themselves or others. Therefore, it was up to the men to control even the female voice. In her refusal to use her voice at all, Ada disconnects herself from her flawed society as much as she is able, locking herself into a shell of outward male stoicism, and only begins to speak again with her personal voice when someone becomes willing to try listening. For her, voice becomes a means of demonstrating power in a world that would give her none. This concept that Ada uses her voice, or rather her muteness, as a means of achieving some sort of power and control over her life is the focus of recent critiques on 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). Rather than constantly attempting to make herself heard in a world that refuses to listen to anything she has to offer, Ada chooses to remain mute. What is amazing about her character is that she determines this from a very young age, the age of 6, and is able to maintain it throughout the various events that happen throughout her life. This is a comment on the tremendous degree to which her society inflicted its control over her as she remains constantly silent in reaction to their attempts to force her into their ideals. She continues keeping her thoughts and ideas to herself until someone worthy of the treasure, someone willing to attempt to learn the language she’s selected in the voice of her piano, comes along. “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). Her power is developed on the psychic level, enabling her to communicate, at one time, with the tutor that became the father of her illegitimate daughter. Through this daughter, it becomes clear that Ada is willing to communicate with the outside world, using her daughter as translator for the sign language she uses at times of high emotion. However, her true attempts to communicate are discovered in the playing of her piano as it is here that her emotions are completely unmasked and offered to the world. Other critics agree that Ada’s silence is an element of power, but one that is designed to discover others of like mind. This concept was suggested to the writer of The Piano by the poetry of Emily Dickenson, who also found it necessary to conceal her true persona within an art form that remained just out of reach of the completely masculine 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 is able to discover herself, her own inner being as best friend and confidant. She learns about the way she communicates and what is important to her to communicate. As she says, she doesn’t think of herself as silent. Within her own mind, she can still hear her voice making small comments and criticisms against the world in which she lives. From this position of self-knowledge and higher thinking, she is able to observe the world around her from a detached position, calmly waiting yet not really expecting someone to recognize her true voice and signal a desire to learn more. While it is this voice the audience of the film hears as Ada presents her narrative, explaining various elements of the story that might otherwise be concealed, this is not inconsistent with the film. Her voice is heard near the beginning of the story as she explains her background and then near the end as she considers suicide. Following this attempt, she begins learning to use her voice again, having discovered a world in which her ideas and feelings will finally be valued. The audience understands it is this voice, the voice of the future, which speaks to them still trapped within the character’s past. Throughout the novel, Campion is careful to illustrate the degree to which people in Ada’s life are willing or unwilling to hear what she is thinking, thus indicating whether they wish to actually know more about her or simply intend to own her in some way. In meeting her husband, Stewart, she immediately but silently argues with him regarding whether her piano will go home or stay on the beach. His refusal to retrieve the piano indicates his unwillingness to hear her at the same time that it becomes clear to the audience at least that the piano represents 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, Stewart’s hired groundskeeper, originally insists that he cannot take her to the beach and her piano, but eventually gives in and begins to understand that the voice of the woman is trapped within the keys of the instrument. Having realized this connection, he goes to great personal expense in order to provide her with access to the piano because of his fascination with the individual he discovered within it. It is through Baines’ growing understanding of her voice that he is finally able to discover the passion of woman she is. “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). As Baines is discovering the beauty and wonder of Ada, her husband continues to reject the piano. He even goes as far as trying to get Baines to take it back when Baines makes the piano a gift to Ada. By the time the piano is returned to its proper owner, though, Ada refuses to allow Stewart to try understanding her soul. It is only after the dramatic climax in which Stewart cuts off Ada’s finger that he finally starts to ‘hear’ her. Understanding that he has forever cut off any chance at knowing her in any true sense, he finally comes to the conclusion that the only way to preserve her is to give her away. In this final admission, Stewart finally demonstrates his understanding that Ada is a person, a full human being, rather than simply an object to be owned or perhaps a stubborn animal to be penned. Another aspect of Ada’s muteness is discovered in the Victorian expectation that respectable women would not own property, make any of their own decisions or demonstrate too much outward emotion. This was true even for those ladies who lived next door to wild Maori natives in the sparsely settled lands of New Zealand. Not only politically mute, women were expected to remain emotionally mute as they meekly obeyed the directives of their men. Any excessive display of emotion was taken to be an indication of the woman’s lack of breeding, lack of self-possession and obvious inability to think rationally. As a result, anything she expresses emotionally or verbally was considered safely ignored. Women who did not fit within this tightly constrained box were chastised by their neighbors either through exclusion from ‘polite’ society or through direct intervention in the form of open criticism. In this way, too, women were considered voiceless as they struggled among themselves to maintain the ideal image. This, too, was a concept directly challenged through Ada’s character. Although she doesn’t have a speaking voice, this is not due to physical inability but rather the 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). Despite obviously becoming emotional at various points, illustrated not just by her own actions, but in the expressions of her daughter, Ada never breaks her silence until someone first makes the effort to hear her true voice. Although she seems to have a relative lock on her emotions, rarely phased by the events occurring around her, she still manages to convey a deep sense of feeling through the medium of her music. The other women comment on this aspect of her character, noticing a “mood that passes into you … to have the sound creep inside you is not at all pleasant” (Campion, 1995). Yet they never seem to speak directly to her unless giving her directives as if she were a child. As a result, Ada is both the most controlled and the most emotional character in the novel. Unsurprisingly, the piano is the most obvious piece of symbolism in the novel. The instrument stands as Ada’s voice to the deepest level of significance. It is also representative of her emotions as the only medium through which she will 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 the woman revealed in the sound of the piano, the true voice of Ada, that Baines falls in love with. His ability to recognize the woman in the sound and in the body made her fall in love with him. The piano provides a physical manifestation of the complicated blending of control and raw emotion illustrated within the character of Ada. It is capable of containing and expressing a tremendous amount of emotion throughout the entire human range, yet it requires individual control and sometimes cooperation to bring together the composite pieces. Attempts to control it externally, such as under the forceful demands of Stewart or the early and undiscussed advances of Baines, only cause it to fall back into silence. Baines’ appreciation of the piano’s voice symbolizes his understanding of the underlying female soul and his willingness to discover it. His attempts to work out a deal with Ada that gives him access to her body may seem somewhat creepy to the viewer, but are the first attempts within the film of anyone to work with Ada on something rather than work on Ada regardless of her feelings. Ada’s refusal to play within Stewart’s hearing demonstrates her abject rejection of the man who abjectly refused to consider her as a human being. At Baines’ expected departure, Ada even pulls out the essential middle C key, cutting off the piano’s voice as symbol of the cutting off of her inner passion. Only when the piano is thrown overboard does Ada learn that her heart and voice had two homes, one in the piano and one in Baines and Flora, giving her the strength to choose life. By the end of the film, the audience again hears Ada’s inner voice as she reveals where she is now and it is realized that she is regaining the use of her real voice. This is a powerful symbol that she has overcome many of the restrictions of the Victorian age. Baines has also created a new finger for her out of silver so that she can play the piano again, reinforcing the idea that she is regaining her voice at the active encouragement of her new husband. She is giving piano lessons, which means she is earning money and is potentially self-sustaining. This is another part of Victorian life that was usually denied to women of respectable standing. Finally, she seems happy and she is seen playing romantic games with Baines, wearing brighter and less constrictive clothing than she’s worn through most of the movie and watching Flora as she turns white cartwheels in the green backyard of their home. As the film ends and the viewer realizes that Ada’s voice has been speaking from the future, it becomes necessary to question whether women in the modern age have really advanced as far as Ada has in discovering how to use their own voice. While women have achieved a great deal more autonomy and ability in terms of work and play, the film questions whether they are acting in accord with their own inner wants and desires, as Ada did, or in accordance with social, typically male, ideals that have shifted to include greater assistance in earning money. Women continue to define themselves by media, again mostly male, depictions of female beauty and struggle to make themselves ‘heard’ in the male world of high business and enterprise by adopting male standards of expression and being. 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 Campion, Jane. The Piano. Miramax Books, 1995. 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). April 4, 2009 “Jane Campion.” Art and Culture. (2009). April 3, 2009 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). April 3, 2009 Question Reflection Question 5: What does Ada’s muteness signify in the film? In the film, Ada cannot speak with other people, but she is able to communicate. She talks very fluently with her daughter using sign language and she is able to communicate her emotions through the voice of her piano. When she feels passionately about something, this is very clear to both Baines and Stewart. Whenever narration is needed, it is Ada’s voice that is heard. This shows that she is not really mute at all, but merely refrains from talking with other people. This idea is first introduced at the beginning of the film when Ada’s voiceover tells the audience that she decided as a child that she would not speak to anyone again, although the reason for this is not clear. The fact that she may still be able to talk is also proved true at the end when she is learning how to talk again when she lives with Baines and Flora. All of this makes even more curious that she doesn’t really have a voice in the film and makes it something that the audience wants to answer. Why is Ada mute? As the story is told, the idea seems to become clearer. It starts when she is not given any voice in choosing who she will marry or where she will live. Her father is never seen in the movie, but he is the one who has made all the arrangements, deciding to give his daughter and granddaughter to a man none of them has ever met based only on their written communications. He lives so far away that the marriage is made official while she is still inside her father’s house and then she is sent all the way to New Zealand, where there is no guarantee that the man she’s been married to will treat her decently and her father will not be nearby to help her if she needs it. He doesn’t seem to care. Ada’s loss of voice as a child is suddenly explained as is her choice to only communicate fluently with her daughter, who apparently suffers from the same voiceless condition even though she can still talk. While she might have decided to talk when she arrived in New Zealand, her greeting by her husband is not what she might have wished for. First, she and Flora are left stranded on the beach overnight, reinforcing the idea that women weren’t all that important to the male world. Then Stewart gives her a very businesslike greeting and refuses to make any kind of arrangements to protect or retrieve her piano. Because this is a great deal of her voice, this essentially tells Ada that she will be as voiceless as Stewart’s wife as she had been as her father’s daughter. She stoically puts up with the nonsense immediately following her arrival at Stewart’s house, such as the phony wedding photo and the gigantic mud-pit that is his yard. Although she gives Stewart the opportunity to know her, he remains unable to hear what she’s trying to communicate to her and she eventually shuts him out completely. Although she doesn’t talk any more to Baines than she does to Stewart, he is able to hear her when Stewart couldn’t. This starts when he submits to her appeals to go back to the beach where her piano has been abandoned. But then he hears her play on the piano and realizes that this is where her passion and true voice are. When he asks her for lessons, he is really asking her to allow him to get to know her better. As they become closer, he begins to understand her better and realizes the role the piano has played in her life. Rather than holding this hostage and gaining her attention through force, he gives the piano back to her, proving that he wants to get to know her because it is her choice, not because it is the only way she can earn her voice back. This proves to be successful and the movie ends with Ada learning to talk again, no longer forced to live in a world where her voice is unimportant. Proposal For this paper, I intend to explore the significance of Ada’s muteness in Jane Campion’s film The Piano. This element of the film emphasizes the role of women in Victorian society as voiceless and powerless entities who just had to put up with whatever their men decided was ‘best’ for them. In many cases, this turned out to be more like what was best for the man, such as Ada’s father getting rid of the expense and trouble of supporting Ada and her daughter by marrying her off to a man who was willing to take ‘damaged goods’. The paper will begin by establishing what the role of women was in Victorian society and present the thesis statement, something about how Ada managed to make herself heard even in a world where her voice didn’t mean anything. To establish the importance of voice to the female identity, I will provide a brief history of how it has been considered. This will serve as the foundation for an more in-depth examination of how the two men in her life in New Zealand differ in the way that they treat her. While Stewart treats her as property, Baines understands she has a personality of her own. This will lead more naturally into a discussion of how Ada identifies with her piano and the various ways in which she is able to communicate her inner thoughts and desires. Finally, an examination of the piano itself will help to illustrate the role of Ada’s voice in helping to shape her world. Assessment letter Looking back over my previous work on this essay, I feel I have made some significant improvements over time. The first essay was not as appropriately supported as the final and it was not as clear in my intention. Although I always had it in mind that Ada’s lack of voice was a tool of power for her, this was not made clear in my first essay and many of my peers felt that I was suggesting it was a sign of additional weakness. With additional feedback, I was able to determine why that impression was coming through when I had intended the opposite. This also enabled me to incorporate greater support in my essay as I attempted to prove that Ada’s lack of voice was a means of her going against the system in every possible way to achieve the strongest tool of independence she could find. Discovering the critics that would support this idea was also largely brought about through the assistance of peer support as others identified those writers who had already discussed the ideas I was trying to convey. As a result, the essay seems more focused on this element of the film at the same time that I feel it does an excellent job of demonstrating why voice was such an important factor. Some peers suggested I remove the paragraph about ololyga, but I feel it is important in establishing the idea that loud voices in women fed into the male conception of women as savage and uncontrollable so Ada couldn’t have simply attempted to shout her way through life as a means of gaining attention. Because men wouldn’t pay attention to her voice at all as a signal of the savage female, she went silent in order to assert control, which is now much better supported through the remainder of the text. Through this process, I also feel as if I have grown as a writer. I have learned how to accept peer criticism and incorporate it into my essay. Instead of feeling like I have to do everything that others suggest, I have learned how to listen to what they have to say, read through what I have written and carefully and judiciously apply their suggestions to the final copy. Some ideas were obviously sound and needed to be added, such as the additional support regarding the power of Ada’s silence, while others were not as obvious or important. The suggestion to remove the historical background regarding the female voice fell somewhere in between these two poles, but was eventually discarded because I strongly felt that these ideas were necessary to truly impart the significance of voice to my readers. Peer review also helped me to try to read my essay as if I were someone else who did not have my ideas already in mind. This was difficult as it required me to block out everything I ‘knew’ in my head and base my judgments only on what was in front of me on the page. Once I accomplished this, it was easier for me to see why my original essay didn’t convey the ideas I had in mind. This process also helped me to become a better peer reader. I was able to read and base my opinions on the information contained on the page without difficulty, but then I had to try to read between the lines to discover what the writer was trying to say. In some cases, this was very clear. In other cases, like mine, an important element was missing that would have made the argument better. While I could tell what the writer was trying to say, they somehow missed the important connecting factor that would make this clear. By trying to understand the writing from the other person’s point of view, I was able to make more helpful suggestions that wouldn’t significantly change their ideas while also making their paper more fully convey what they wanted to say. I think trying to read the paper from their perspective also helped me make suggestions in a more tactful way that didn’t just say ‘this is terrible’ but that actually offered helpful suggestions on how to make it better. Revising my essay several times over has also made it clear to me that I still have a long way to go to become a great writer. When I entered university, my writing was very formulaic. I was very well-grounded in the concept of a strict outline form of essay that could be easily tracked through the reading. This usually made the essay pretty boring and pedantic, but it was the only way I knew how to write. I believe this essay has evolved to a more interesting shape. Although it still strongly follows the outline format of thesis statement, topic sentences, quotes and support, it has a more natural flow than my earlier essays and is much easier to read all the way through. When I first started university, I had a tendency to write in very short, choppy sentences that my instructors would complain about. Now I seem to write in very long sentences that usually need at least one period in between. In proofreading now, I usually find myself splitting up sentences one or two times. This is something I will likely continue to work on, attempting to find a happy medium between short and long sentences. As a reader I have also learned to be much more conscious about the material I am reading. I have discovered through personal experience that there are many cases in which the writer has intended to say one thing and ends up saying something else entirely. Careful reading can sometimes make these intentions clear. Even when this isn’t the case, though, careful reading can often suggest ways in which the reading is personally meaningful to today’s context. In examining The Piano, I learned that the stories coming out of Victorian era literature can still be applied to conditions as they exist today even though our social structure is vastly different. This ability to apply my reading to my real world situation will probably have a great deal of effect on my future life. I fully intend to be a more conscious reader from this point forward as I reread some of the literature I passed over as a student and see what other personal applications it may have to the kind of person I want to be. 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