Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

LOOKING BACK?

2009; Routledge; Volume: 24; Issue: 59 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/08164640802680627

1465-3303

Margaret Jolly,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Earlier versions of this paper were presented at seminars at the Australian National University (ANU), Macquarie University, the University of California at Santa Cruz and University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. I thank all the participants in those seminars for a series of stimulating discussions, and especially Jeremy Beckett for his thoughts on the representation of Māori, Donna Haraway for her scintillating suggestions on the mother–daughter relation, and Reshela DuPuis for her generous re-engagement with her essay written long ago. Permission to reproduce images from the film could alas not be obtained from Miramax despite many attempts. I thank Jan Chapman for her helpful efforts. I thank my colleagues in the Gender Relations Centre at the ANU and especially Michelle Antoinette, John Ballard, Tamara Jacka and Aileen Pangutalan for insightful comments on the final version. Finally, my heartfelt thanks to Michelle Antoinette for her meticulous and engaged reading and editing of the paper for both substance and style. 1. This Māori word currently refers to foreigners of European ancestry, and is especially used by those who affirm bi-culturalism in Aotearoa New Zealand (see King Citation1985; Phillips Citation1987). On Campion's perception of Pakeha as having 'no history' see Campion (Citation1993, 135) and interviews in Wexman (Citation1999) and McHugh (Citation2007). 2. See McHugh (Citation2007), 163–67) for a full filmography of Campion's corpus, although French (Citation2007) notes some errors in chronology and attribution. 3. It shared the Palme d'Or with Farewell My Concubine. Campion had earlier won the Palme d'Or for Best Short film at Cannes in 1986 for her film Peel (McHugh Citation2007, 1). 4. Campion portrays the novel as one of several sources (alongside Wuthering Heights and Emily Dickinson) and as not sufficiently interesting to finish (Bilbrpugh and Campion 1996, 184). I did finish the book, a melodramatic romance of far greater historical than literary interest. Hoeveler's claims (Citation1998) of crucial similarities between novel and film are unfounded (see Hardy Citation2000; Jones Citation2007). Belated international allegations of plagiarism perhaps diffused that antipodean habit of cutting down 'tall poppies' (see Duff Citation1994; Margolis Citation2000b, 4). 5. Compare Reid's suggestion that Baines' moko is akin to blackface, which allows whites to indulgently identify with, but also to mock, blacks. See also Roscoe and Hardy (Citation1996). 6. The antipodean reception was not identical between Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, perhaps reflecting divergent colonial histories and the fate of indigenous peoples. See Margolis' (Citation2000a) rival claims of the film as Australian or New Zealand and Annabel CitationCooper (forthcoming) on Campion as an antipodean. 7. See Jacobs (Citation1994) for a compelling analysis of this opening scene and how Campion consummately connects vision and voice and self-consciously plays with the border between reality and fantasy. Compare McHugh on how the opening scene confounds the intra- and the intersubjective, the speaker and the spoken to (2007, 79) and Jones' (Citation2007, 13) analysis of this 'glorious opening image' as blurring touch and vision. 8. The sequences set in Scotland which follow the opening scene are telegraphic and darkly enigmatic. Some see herein suggestions of sexual abuse by Ada's father as the origin of her muteness (e.g. Rothermel Citation2007, 267). Both here and in later sequences there are suggestions of trauma (see Jones Citation2007, 54), if not abuse by the father and an incestuous child, then familial rejection because of an illegitimate child with Flora's 'fantasy father'. 9. The animated image of Flora's father being struck by lightning was derived from Campion's reading of children's books of the period (McHugh Citation2007, 82). 10. Knight (Citation2006) discerns a collision between models of women's piano playing as performing a genteel femininity and a dangerous female appropriation of the Romantic model of the male artist as passionate virtuoso. Baker (Citation1997) argues that Campion's portrayal of Ada conforms to a Romantic paradigm of creative art as expressive of deep, repressed emotions and the 'true inner self'. Knight's analysis, inspired by Butler, sees no truth of self but competing performances of femininity (2006, 28). Campion performs an 'absurdly literal' (Baker Citation1997, 192) or, rather, a knowingly ironic enactment of French feminist theory apropos Ada's muteness, eroticised music and mutilation (Attwood Citation1998; Baker Citation1997; Jacobs Citation1994). 11. Jones astutely perceives how the 'hypnotic score' 'swells and rises, ebbs and flows, saturates the crucial scenes in an irresistible tonal wash' (2007, 3) consonant with the underwater palette of the cinematography. 12. McHugh discerns a tension between the aural register which dissolves differences between subjects and the visual register which highlights differentiated points of view (2007, 86–87). 13. Knight (Citation2006) perceives the piano both as prosthesis and love object. See McHugh on the mimesis between Ada's fingers and keys as digits (2007, 79). 14. This scene, like the final sequences, has been obsessively discussed. 15. See Janet Patterson, the costume designer, quoted in Bruzzi (Citation1993b, 9). 16. This pertains to Ada's relation to Flora and to her piano, in the drowning sequence, where the rope connecting her to the piano mimics an umbilicus to a maternal body (see Jacobs Citation1994; Haraway Citation2001). 17. See Attwood (Citation1998) on the male gaze as self-reflexive: Ada's portrait becomes his mirror (cf. McHugh Citation2007, 84). 18. See Patterson, costume designer, as quoted in Bruzzi (Citation1993b, 9). 19. We first see their wedding portrait in a tight frame, with Ada and Stewart in front of a sunny, romantic painted background; the camera then pans out to reveal the rain and an ineffectual parasol (Bruzzi Citation1993b, 8). Compare McHugh's (Citation2007, 87) and Jones' (Citation2007, 44, 47) analyses of this scene. 20. DuPuis ([1996] 2000) disputes this. 21. McHugh perceives this tactile mimesis between cunnilingus and the dog's licking as a meta-narrative joke (2007, 88); we 'get it' but Stewart does not. 22. Campion comments: 'Ada actually uses her husband as a sexual object … to see a woman actually doing it, especially a Victorian woman, is somehow shocking' (1993, 139). Jones finds this scene 'audacious and unexpected', full of gentle erotic possibility from which Stewart recoils (Jones Citation2007, 48). 23. McHugh suggests that Frida Kahlo was a model for Ada's relentless female gaze (2007, 81; cf. Wexman Citation1999, 100). 24. See Jones (Citation2007, 34–37) and Margaroni (Citation2003) on the particular, even peculiar, character of the voiceover. 25. The veil has been interpreted variously as bridal veil and funeral cloth; it surely suggests both. 26. See Klinger's (Citation2006) scintillating analysis of this 'arresting image' in relation to affect, dream and memory. Campion's mother suggested the poem by Hood (Wexman Citation1999, 104). 27. Jacobs (Citation1994), 775–79) and Jones (Citation2007) suggest there are three rather than two endings: the drowning, as Campion originally intended; the scenes of domestic contentment; and the unsettling coda of Hood's poem when we see Ada's dead body lurking in the deep. Rather than contradiction or narrative irresolution it concludes with a deeply unsettling haunting of death in life, of 'death and not-death, a cinematic moment of meditation' (Jones Citation2007, 72). 28. Campion expresses her intentions thus: 'Even though it's a European story, which is what I am—European—I determined that it would involve having Māori people in the film … It wasn't without tears and difficulty … In the end the cross-cultural quality of it was one of the deeply moving aspects of being on the production for us all, cast and crew' (Campion Citation1993, 142–43). 29. I do not know whether those sequences were never shot or discarded. In the screenplay, Hira alludes to an earlier relationship with a whaler just like Baines, hinting at sexual interest (Campion Citation1993, 55), while in the film she suggests he seek other younger Māori women. Norgrove (Citation1998), 52) suggests that another scene in which Hira and Baines discuss the exchange of land for guns (Campion Citation1993, 104–05) was edited out. 30. Norgrove observes how the representation of Māori in European clothes for New Zealanders evokes images of nineteenth-century Māori by the artist C.F. Goldie (Norgrove Citation1998, 48). McHugh (Citation2007), 81) notes how colonial photographs in the Turnbull Library in Wellington were an important source. The untranslated chant is by Selwyn Muru and meditates on evanescence and mortality. The effect of not translating Māori language is debatable; it also evokes a world beyond colonial knowledge. 31. See Dyson on whiteness as beauty and spiritual purity (1995a, 273), and Norgrove on Ada's whiteness as eroticised (1998, 50). 32. Campion said: 'The bush has got an enchanted, complex, even frightening quality to it … It's mossy and very intimate, and there's an underwater look that's always charmed me … its dark, inner world' (1993, 139). See Jones (Citation2007), 1–2) on the compelling visual connection of sea and forest. 33. The film deploys montage of North and South Island bush, primary rainforest and regenerating scrub and artificially created landscape (Andrew McAlpine quoted in Campion Citation1993, 140–41). 34. Compare Dyson on Māori as backdrop for the drama of the principal white characters (1995b, 119). 35. In an early scene, Māori guides take another path from beach to bush so as not to breach a tapu. Baines understands but Stewart is suspicious that Māori simply want to make more money by making the journey home longer (see Campion Citation1993, 27). 36. See Belich (Citation1996), King (Citation2003) and Kawharu (Citation1989). 37. Jones observes how both in the 'Bluebeard' sequence and the final sequences, Māori men are depicted as saviours of white women and manifest 'assertion, wit and resistant autonomy' (2007, 23). 38. See Jones' superb account of the scene of the mutilation (2007, 54–60). 39. For DuPuis ([1996] 2000, 366), Baines is portrayed as virile and hyper-masculine while the Māori man is 'feminized, impotent and childlike'. For me, the feminisation of the Māori man evokes gender crossing or homoerotic interest rather than colonial emasculation (see Campion's statement in Wexman Citation1999, 104). In other scenes Māori men appear as virile, even hyper-masculine warriors, porters and navigators. 40. Jones' analysis of this scene is more generous, portraying Māori as 'sexually emancipated and physically open' (2007, 27). On eroticism and exoticism in the Pacific, see my essays (Jolly Citation1997a Citationb), books by Matsuda (Citation2005), O'Brien (Citation2006), Tcherkézoff (Citation2004), Wallace (Citation2003) and Trevor Graham's film Hula !74!Girls (Citation2006). 41. See McHugh's analysis of Stewart's punitive correction of Flora's tree-love through whitewashing as a visual pun (2007, 88). 42. For me, the Thomas Hood coda rather evokes universal themes of mortality and death. 43. The website of the Auckland Art Gallery depicts the sculpture as a meditation on 'the weight of celebration, mourning and loss' (http://www.aucklandartgallery.govt.nz/brightparadise/artists/michael_parekowhai.asp). 44. The epoch is not so vague. Campion herself (Wexman Citation1999, 97) and most critics suggest it is about 1850. 45. Neill notes the lack of reference to the Treaty of Waitangi, contracted in 1840, a decade before the story is set and the anachronism that Baines and Stewart are engaged in private land acquisition in a period when the British Crown had assumed a monopoly (Neill Citation1999, 143; Kawharu Citation1989). Neill suggests the silence about the struggle for sovereignty in that period implies a silence about similar struggles in the era of the film's making. 46. Jones notes the parodic effect of their singing God Save the Queen as they sit sewing on the floor as diminishing both 'the British monarchy and Christian authority' (2007, 28). 47. Jones notes the length of many face shots of Ada, not the usual six or seven seconds, but thirty-three seconds or more (2007, 46). This might partially explain the strong identification which many feminist critics report. Gillett (Citation1995) proclaimed: 'I was entranced, moved, dazed', while Laleen Jayamanne (Citation2001) reported a profound pain in her own index finger, after writing about the film, echoing Ada's pain after her mutilation (cited in Klinger Citation2006, 19). 48. Margaroni (Citation2003) deploys Kristeva in an archly theoretical analysis, alleging that Māori people, like Kristeva's 'daughter in crisis', are trapped and must enact a matricide on the mother/land to achieve status as mature and autonomous 'post-contact' subjects capable of change and global interactions beyond the mother/land. This claim is innocent of any evidence from Māori sources. 49. Campion suggests: 'I feel a kinship between the kind of romance that Emily Bronte portrayed in Wuthering Heights and this film … it's very harsh and extreme, a gothic exploration of the romantic impulse. I wanted to respond to those ideas in my own century … My exploration can be a lot more sexual, a lot more investigative of the power of eroticism' (1993, 140). 50. Several critics discern a dichotomy of nature/culture at work in the film but few stress the dynamic relation between the 'nature' imputed to the wild landscape, to Māori people, and that within Ada herself. Jacobs suggests a celebration of both 'the sunlit beauty of the outdoors' and the 'indoor sexuality of sexual passion' (1994, 759). I further suggest that the 'nature' of Ada's passionate interiority ultimately transcends the 'nature' of the anteriority imputed to Māori people and place.