"Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire." .
(Roland Barthes, A Lovers Discourse).
Jane Campion's 1993 film The Piano opens with Ada's mind speaking directly to the audience through blurred, intertwined fingers. As the film unfolds we begin to see the significance of this opening scene. An elective mute from the age of six, Ada has withdrawn from the male dominated society she inhabits. By communicating via her daughter Flora, her voice being "heard only indirectly" (Bruzzi, 1993, p7) and expressing emotion through her music, Ada's hands have become her only link to this society. Stewart has no idea how to approach Ada. The distorted images Campion uses as Stewart views his wife reflect the distorted male Victorian view of women, and through his inability to communicate or listen, Stewart cuts off Ada's emotional link, her piano. By the time Ada arrives at her new home, she is trapped, not only within the barren landscape, which represents her marriage, but also within herself. .
The way Campion uses the landscape and locations in the film is central to our understanding of the patriarchal Victorian world, which Ada must negotiate in order to discover her true heterosexual self and her place in a masculine world.
The landscape surrounding her husband's house is dead. Nature is absent, reflecting Victorian mans destructive desire to control it. The infertile ground on which her marriage has been sown is surrounded by glutinous mud and dense, snagging undergrowth. To leave this world she must negotiate these obstacles, always climbing upwards, only to have to descend again into Campions grey tinted nightmare of marriage. We are given a vision of a Miltonic like version of Hell (Elledge), much like that of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, hidden within the seemingly beautiful island paradise of Eden, presented to us at the start as Ada is symbolically manhandled by faceless hands onto the beach.
