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

Abstract

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) 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.