Portrait of a Lady - From Novel to Film

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Portrait of a Lady - From Novel to Film

Jane Campion's most recent film, Portrait of a Lady (1996), offers a distinct departure from her previous work, The Piano (1993), with which some critics have found fault. In her 1998 article, for example, while commending Campion for introducing two characters able to renounce the gender warfare that characterizes Western culture, Diane Long Hoeveler criticizes Campion for celebrating marriage, the idea that women cannot survive without a man at the center of their lives (Hoeveler 110, 114). Second, she asserts that while Campion toys with feminist issues and images, Piano is Aromantic and escapist, with Ada's decision to be reborn with Baines a step hardly worthy of the serious feminist issues that Campion seems to be raising in the film (Hoeveler 114). Finally, she points out that Campion is heavily indebted to a 1920s work, The Story of a New Zealand River by Jane Mander. Partly as a consequence of not acknowledging this debt, the film has conflicting sources, Campion's rather permissive twentieth century script about adultery, superimposed on Mander's original, in which the Victorian heroine is not united sexually with her lover until after her husband's death. Enacting a basically contemporary drama in anachronistic costumes and setting, Hoeveler says the film contains gaps, ...fissures we sense while viewing it (Hoeveler 114). For example, how likely is it, she asks, that an 1850s heroine would conduct an adulterous affair? In (Re)Visioning the Gothic (1998), Cyndy Hendershot echoes this view, calling Baines, the film's nontraditional male (Harvey Keitel), a deus ex machina, a fairy-tale character, an imaginary resolution to two real problems, on the one hand the castratio...

... middle of paper ...

..., Campion breaks his barrier of reticence about sex, money and behavior and delivers the facts straight. Hardly faithful to him as she is, though, Jane Campion's work is itself made possible by the original master, Henry James.

Sources Cited

Bluestone, George. Novels Into Film. California UP, 1971.

Campion, Jane. The Piano. London: Bloomsbury, 1993.

Dapkus, Jeanne R. Sloughing off the Burdens. Film Literature Quarterly 25.3 (1997): 177-187.

Giannetti, Louis. Understanding Movies. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1972.

Hendershot, Cyndy. (Re)Visioning the Gothic. Film Literature Quarterly 26.2 (1998): 97-108.

Hoeveler, Diane Long. Silence, Sex, and Feminism. Film Literature Quarterly 26.2 (1998): 109-116.

James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady. 1881. New York: Random House, 1996.

Jones, Laura. The Portrait of a Lady. New York: Penguin, 1996.

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