Jane Campion's Selling of the Mother/Land: Restaging the Crisis of the Postcolonial Subject

Matricide and Postcolonial Melancholia

In Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie argues that for contemporary global citizens, "of all the many elephant traps lying ahead . . . the largest and most dangerous" one is "that form of internal exile which in South Africa is called the 'homeland.'" ¹ As he explains, "to confine ourselves within narrowly defined cultural frontiers" would be to "forget that there is a world beyond the community to which we belong." What is more, it would render us blind to the other homeland(s) defined when one is borne across borders in migration, diaspora, displacement, or translation (20). In insisting that the survival of the postcolonial subject is predicated on an ability to negate what is most familiar, even maternal (as in the term motherland), to him or her, Rushdie seems to anticipate Julia Kristeva's call to matricide as she has articulated it in Black Sun, her study of depression and melancholia. "For man and for woman the loss of the mother is a biological and psychic necessity, the first step on the way to becoming autonomous. Matricide is our vital necessity," she writes. ² Like Rushdie, Kristeva inscribes the post- (partum) subject (the very possibility of moving "post") at the cutting edge of this realization. For Kristeva, an inability to separate from the mother is as dangerous a form of internal exile as confining oneself within the borders of one's native land. This is why she emphasizes that the human being's entrance into the symbolic order is contingent on the acceptance of a loss. It is because this loss involves what is most intimate to the subject, exposing it to a scission at its very core, that Kristeva insists on conceptualizing the beginning (of speech or subjectivity) in terms of a crisis.

Although it is experienced by both men and women, the crisis brought about by the "vital necessity" of matricide is more acutely felt by the female subject due to the daughter's more immediate "specular identification with the mother" (28). If "she" is "I," then, as Kristeva emphasizes, matricide for the daughter is "difficult, if not impossible" (29). Indeed, for her the dilemma, "Daughter of the father? Or daughter of the mother?"—a dilemma that Kristeva places at the threshold of speaking subjectivity—takes the form of a choice between life and death. ³ This is precisely, I would like to suggest, the predicament of the subject emerging out of colonial experience who is unable, to define himself or herself in isolation from the actual and phantasmatic body of the native land. In this light, the failure in the context of postcolonial studies to heed Rushdie's warning against "go[ing] voluntarily into that form of internal exile" proves significant. It is, I would argue, indicative of an "unbelief" that Kristeva places at the heart of the melancholic daughter-in-crisis; namely, an unbelief in the conveyability of the mother, the possibility Rushdie talks about of retrieving the motherland in a multiplicity of forms elsewhere. ⁴

In this essay, I want to explore the drama of geopolitical and maternal separation at the heart of Jane Campion's film The Piano (Australia/New Zealand/France, 1993) by reading Kristeva's account of gendered subjectivity in the framework of postcolonial theory. My aim is to question the political effectiveness of what I would term a "melancholic temperament" in postcolonial studies. As both Rushdie and Kristeva emphasize, clinging to the body of the mother might be a form of suicide, for the subject is incapable of constructing himself or herself as a "living system": that is, according to Kristeva, a system "open to the other, capable of adaptation and change." ⁵

This is, in my view, what The Piano demonstrates in its dramatization of the melancholic daughter's dilemma. ⁶ In fact, what renders the film all the more interesting for...