Re-presenting the Embodied Child: the Muted Child, the Tamed Wife and the Silenced Instrument in Jane Campion’s The Piano

Abstract

I like young children a lot… I am extremely interested in the contrast between children and adults: there is a world looking at another world which is going downhill but this world does not yet know if its own fate will be the same … The look of a child is always fascinating. It seems to be saying: is that what fate has in store for me, too?

In films, as in dreams, nothing is accidental, it is only awaiting the right interpreter.

(Bergen Freudank, When Truffaut Lied, 1997)

The framework and basic ideas of this chapter were presented to and benefited from a seminar at Keele in 1993 organized by the editor under the auspices of the ESRC. It was originally suggested by and had already benefited from discussions with students and colleagues at Brunei. Ideally, the reader who is not familiar with Campion’s work should watch a video of The Piano before, or even perhaps instead of, reading the chapter. If the spirit nevertheless moves to read the chapter, it might then be a logical outcome to watch the video again afterwards. I thought it appropriate to allow the general lines of the plot to emerge from my meta-narrative rather than to present an, inevitably inadequate, summary. Should Anne Mobbs or Colin Macarthur happen to read it they might either be surprised that their influence has lasted so long or dismayed that it has been so misconstrued. The latter, at least, might applaud my recognition of non-diegetic syntagms. I am also grateful to Annelise Middelthon who, with difficulty, forced me to recognize that metonym was at least as important as metaphor.