"Conscious Observation of a Lovely Woman": Jane Campion's Portrait in Film

When James named his novel The Portrait of a Lady, he signaled his awareness that the genre of the novel, like that of portraiture, provided for a species of girl-watching. “Girl-watching,” of course, is a coyly anachronistic way of describing one of the nineteenth-century novel’s historical functions as a genre for taking the measure of the changing status, styles, and interior lives of young middle-class women. But if the anachronism is coy, it is not misleading. For, among the many nuanced meanings James’s novel attaches to “the sweet-tasting property of observation” (PL 231), certainly it includes an anticipation of the kind of diffusely eroticized watching that has such a central place in our contemporary popular culture. Still, what James couldn’t have known—though Jane Campion clearly does—is that girl-watching would be one of the motivating energies in the history of cinema. Campion has made a film that doesn’t try to translate a novel to the screen but attempts something closer to the reverse: a backwards displacing of the history and material conditions of film onto a narrative of nineteenth-century womanhood.

For Ralph Touchett, James’s narrator tells us, the “conscious observation of a lovely woman had struck him as the finest entertainment that the world now had to offer” (PL 231). The pressure exerted by the word “entertainment,” already strong in James’s novel, could be said to have an even stronger force when Campion makes a film adaptation over a century later. How entertaining will it be to watch Isabel on the screen? It depends on what you count as entertainment. A film adaptation of James’s novel necessarily makes the meaning of “entertainment” intersect with the history of mass entertainment, a history in which the “conscious observation of a lovely woman” carries a set of materially realized meanings, among them the occult substance of female celebrity and an archive of visual styles for representing female sexuality, from the signature look of women in Hitchcock movies to the clichés of pornography. What is the relation between the literary entertainment James offers his readers and the observation of a particular “lovely woman,” Nicole Kidman, that Campion offers her viewers?

A film version of James’s novel of necessity has to be written in flesh, conveyed in the visual images of actor’s bodies rather than the hieroglyphics of print. Campion underscores this fact by presenting one of the few conventional moments of writing in film, the title shot, as a handwritten inscription on a woman’s finger. An opening sequence seems to make something of the same point by offering a series of tableaux of modern-day young women in outdoor scenes—some moving or dancing, some motionless, but all silent and looking at the camera that is filming them. A “portrait” in film, Campion seems to insist, is not a novel. Even a famous nineteenth-century text by a famously language-obsessed novelist will be fashioned out of elemental acts of looking at the faces and bodies of women once it is recreated on screen. By calling such stark attention to the act of observing women, Campion may seem to be in accord with much recent film and art scholarship, which has grounded aesthetic meaning in a syntax of gendered vision. While male looking asserts a possession and mastery of visual objects, a woman’s gaze is always occluded, circumscribed by the internalized effects of her position as an erotic and social subordinate. In John Berger’s oft-cited formulation, “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at” ¹ (47).

Certainly Campion shares the interest of theorists in the power relations of vision and in the erotic energies that may be generated along lines of sight. But whereas this strain of film theory seems to me to quickly harden into something reductive and ahistorical (“the law of the male gaze”), Campion seems determined to complicate the syntax of vision and gender even as she recognizes what we might call women’s traditional default position as an eroticized...